Rural area deployment of internet of things connectivity: LTE and LoRaWAN case study

Abstract

Actually many Internet of Things (IoT) applications and architectures are being deployed in order to support urban area applications, as for example smart cities. However, other important applications are being deployed in rural areas, as for example agribusiness, in which wireless connectivity is one of the most important issues because wireless broadband commercial technologies are not sustainable from the business model view. In order to attend the actual demand of rural areas, the present work proposes two study cases that optimize coverage and low energy consumption joining LTE and LoRaWAN wireless access technologies. The proposal architecture is based on an element called Intelligent Terminal (IT), which is a gateway that is composed by LTE and LoRaWAN interfaces. The first study case represents a terrestrial vehicular case and the second one represents an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) case. The terrestrial study case is used as a reference to get a quantified gain of using UAVs. Considering that every scenario has particularities in terrestrial relief characteristics, it was obtained coverage information of five scenarios with different radius. When the radius coverage is increased, usability of UAV becomes more important. In average, for radius equal to 45 km and an UAV height equal to 50 m the gain of using UAVs is equal to 2 times the coverage than using a terrestrial solution. Other important contribution are parameters of a linear equation that estimate the average coverage gain based on any arbitrary UAV altitude.