Performance of LoRa for Bike-Sharing Systems

Today bike sharing systems are becoming popular in many cities as short-distance transit vehicles. More than 18 million bicycles are available worldwide for public use and one of the main problems that afflicts such sharing systems is the loss of bikes, which can be stolen or simply left in unknown locations. Thus, many bikes are docked or tracked using GPS and costly cellular connections. In this paper, we consider the emerging Long Range (LoRa) technology for use in bike sharing systems. LoRa exploits free ISM bands and has been conceived for low power and low data rate applications. Additionally, LoRa is characterized by large cells and heterogeneous application domains, which may lead to extremely high numbers of devices coexisting in the same cell. Thus, in this paper we study the scalability limits of a typical LoRa cell, showing that the performance of LoRa in crowded scenarios can be quite limited when using high spreading factors (SFs). Then, we design and realize a prototype of LoRa tracker module that can be embedded in a bike and we test its use in a large area of Palermo city, Italy. According to our knowledge, this is the first paper that study the performance of LoRa for bike sharing systems.