Analysis, Design and Empirical Validation of a Smart Campus based on LoRaWAN

Internet of Things (IoT) applications in smart environments demand challenging requirements to the wireless networks in terms of security, coverage, availability, power consumption, and scalability. The technologies employed so far to cope with IoT scenarios are not yet able to manage simultaneously all these demanding requirements, but recent solutions like Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WANs) have emerged as a promising alternative to provide low-cost and low-power consumption connectivity to nodes spread throughout a wide area. Specifically, the Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) standard is one of the most successful developments, receiving attention from both industry and academia. This work presents a comprehensive case study of LoRaWAN under a realistic scenario within a smart city: a smart campus. Such a medium-scale scenario has been implemented through the in-house developed 3D Ray Launching radio planning simulator including traffic lights, vehicles, people, buildings and urban furniture and vegetation. The developed tool is able to provide accurate radio propagation estimations within the smart campus scenario in terms of coverage,
capacity and energy efficiency of the network. These results are compared with an empirical validation in order to assess the operating conditions and the system accuracy. We further present an analysis of the key findings in order to provide some guidelines for IoT vendors, network operators, and city planners to investigate further deployments of LoRaWAN for large-scale smart city applications.