Evaluating indoor and outdoor localization services for LoRaWAN in Smart City applications

Nowadays, wireless technologies penetrate all aspects of our lives. “Internet of Things” (IoT) and “Location- Based Services” are the pillars of Smart City concept. The IoT smart objects surrounding us are an integral part of the Internet, thanks to their computational and communication capabilities. In such applications, location information can be exploited in all the layers of the stack, from the application level (e.g., to correctly interpret measurements from sensor nodes deployed on the field), down to the physical level (e.g., for sensing coverage). One of the most viable solutions for Smart City wireless connectivity seems to be the use of long-range, low-power and low-throughput low-power wide area networks (LPWANs). In this work, the authors devise the jointly use of LPWANs with widely-diffused and well-accepted localization techniques, as the Global Positioning Systems (GPS, outdoor) and real-time location systems (RTLS, indoor), for Smart Campus applications. In particular, a LoRaWAN node equipped with both GPS and Ultra Wide Bandbased UWB-RTLS has been developed and tested in real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach; in particular, location errors are in the order of few tens of meters for GPS and in the order of few tens of centimeters for UWB.