On the Use of LoRaWAN and Cloud Platforms for Diversification of Mobility-as-a-Service Infrastructure in Smart City Scenarios

Abstract

Many different application domains are taking advantage from the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Among them, intelligent transportation systems can improve efficiency and sustainability by exploiting increased awareness about the actual mobility resource availability. For this reason, the idea of mobility as a service is gaining consensus. However, satisfying the requirements of very heterogeneous scenarios can be really challenging. In this work, we propose adding redundancy and diversity to the IoT platforms to improve overall resilience and flexibility, other than mitigating unstable behaviors. A proof-of-concept prototype is realized around a commercial IoT platform natively intended for the automotive domain. New “paths” from the vehicles to the end users, different from the original one, are added for retrieving the information: one additional LoRaWAN trunk and the other two via IBM Cloud service. A methodology for performance evaluation is suggested, computing purposely defined metrics. When applied to a sample use case, experimental results show that the redundancy and diversity strategies, compared to the (best) single-path approach, halve the overall average transfer delay (from about 1.2 s down to about 0.5 s) and the standard deviation (from about 0.5 to about 0.3 s).