Athlete Tracking at a Marathon Event with LoRa: A Performance Evaluation with Mobile Gateways

Accurate and continuous location monitoring of athletes helps meeting health and safety requirements and supporting the infotainment needs of large marathon events with thousands of participants. Currently the tracking of individuals and groups of athletes at mass sports events is only possible to a limited extent, due to weight, size and cost constraints of the necessary devices. At marathon events, the usual infrastructure for timekeeping is RFID technology, which allows only precise tracking at huge intervals, with heuristic and interpolative algorithms to estimate runner positions in between the measuring points. Setting up RFID tracking stations on site is also material and labour intensive. We instead propose a continuous, real-time tracking solution, relying on LPWAN LoRa GPS trackers. Due to the large geographical area and urban space in which marathon events take place, the positioning of static gateways cannot provide complete and continuous coverage. This research article presents an implementation with multiple LoRa trackers and mobile LoRa gateways installed on vehicle escorts to assess coverage quality. The tracking data collected by a receiving LNS is stored in a database. Three experiments were conducted at three different official running events, a 10 km race, a half marathon and a marathon. The backdrop for 42.195 km was the official Vienna Marathon 2024 with more than 35,000 participants. The experimental results under these realistic conditions show the reception quality of this approach, e.g. during the marathon, received packets from LoRa gateways were at an average distance of about 136 metres (σ 157m) from the tracker with an average update rate of 49 seconds across all trackers, using DR3/SF9. At greater distances the quality decreases, although some outliers were received up to a distance of two kilometres. A possible prospect is that LPWAN may repeat the history of RFID by entering the mass sports market from the industry.