Experimental Study on LoRaWAN Technology Applied to Vehicular-to-Infrastructure (V2I) Communication

This paper presents an experimental study on the suitability of Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) in the communication and monitoring of vehicles in Metropolitan Manila, Philippines. The system has two components—the sensor nodes and the gateway. The sensor nodes send packets that contain the location of the vehicle and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values to the LoRaWAN gateway. The characterization of the coverage range of the gateway was conducted along a highway in an urban area. After characterization of the coverage range of the gateway was conducted, it was found that the maximum distance is approximately 700 m within the RSSI acceptable range of $$-30$$ to $$-120$$ dBm. To test the communication and possible interferences between the vehicles and the base station, two sensor nodes, one for each vehicle, and one gateway at the base station were set up. The experiments were carried out in different scenarios during sunny and rainy weather conditions. The results show that the signal from the two sensor nodes do not interference with each other as there is no significant effect on the RSSI values measured from both vehicles. The communication between the vehicles and the gateway went smoothly as the LoRaWAN gateway was placed on top of a building to maintain line-of-sight (LOS) conditions.