LoRaWAN for smart city IoT deployments: a long term evaluation

LoRaWAN is a Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology designed for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments; this paper presents experiences from deploying a city-scale LoRaWAN network across Southampton, UK. This network was deployed to support an installation of air quality monitors and to explore the capabilities of LoRaWAN. This deployment uses a mixture of commercial off-the-shelf gateways and custom gateways. These gateway locations were chosen based on network access, site permission and accessibility, and are not necessarily the best locations theoretically. Over 135,000 messages have been transmitted by the twenty devices analysed. Over the course of the complete deployment, 72.4 % of the messages were successfully received by the data server. Of the messages that were received, 99 % were received within 10 s of transmission. We conclude that LoRaWAN is an applicable communication technology for city-scale air quality monitoring and other smart city applications.