LoRaWAN for city scale IoT deployments

Philip James Basford, Steven J. Johnston, Mihaela Apetroaie-Cristea, Florentin Michel Jacques Bulot, Simon J. Cox

Abstract: LoRaWAN is a Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology designed for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, this paper presents experiences gained from deploying a citywide LoRaWAN network across Southampton, UK. This network has been deployed to support an installation of air quality sensors and to explore the LoRaWAN technology. This deployment uses a mixture of commercial off-the-shelf gateways and custom gateways. The custom gateways have required the development of a new printed circuit board interface which is available open-source. The gateway locations have been chosen based on combination of availability and predicted coverage. This paper shows that this approach has provided a reasonable coverage of the city.