Performance Study of LoRaWAN for Smart-City Applications

One of the verticals that will be more benefited with the arrival of upcoming 5G deployments are smart-cities. Under this umbrella, different applications for end-users will be developed in two principal scenarios in the city, namely, under mobility conditions or in static situations. In order to provide ubiquitous connectivity in these scenarios, the Low Power-Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) technologies have emerged, hence enabling the development of novel Internet of Things (IoT) services. In this line, LoRaWAN is one of the most prominent LP-WAN alternatives that is considered to be integrated within the 5G ecosystem. In this work, we focus on evaluating the performance of this technology under different working conditions. A comparison between two commercial LoRaWAN gateways is presented and the attained results in both deployments are compared and discussed. The outcomes place LoRaWAN as an outstanding solution to be adopted in smart-city deployments for supporting certain IoT applications.