Scalability of LPWAN for Smart City Applications

Smart Cities rely on a broad variety of services generating an heterogeneous traffic load, and having diverse privacy and performance requirements. In this paper, we focus on mobility services for an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), where several applications inter-operate by sharing information. In particular, we consider three main services: ride-hailing, smart parkings and traffic regulation. To investigate the load generated by these mobility services, we rely on two real datasets. Our goal is to study whether a given technology can scale with realistic conditions related to the envisioned smart mobility scenario. In particular, we analyze here how many LoRa gateways are necessary and how they should be deployed to support these mobility services. We highlight the bottlenecks occurring in most dense areas of the network and argue that heterogeneous deployments can efficiently handle such hot spots.