Unveiling LoRa's Oceanic Reach: Assessing the Coverage of the Azores LoRaWAN Network from an Island.

In maritime settings, effective communication between vessels and land infrastructure is crucial, but existing technologies often prove impractical for energy-sensitive IoT applications, like deploying sensors at sea. In this study, we explore the viability of a low-power, cost-effective wireless communication solution for maritime sensing data. Specifically, we conduct an experimental assessment of the Azorean Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) coverage. Our tests involve positioning the gateway at the island's highest point and installing end nodes on medium-sized fishing vessels. Through measurements of received signal strength indicator (RSSI), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and lines of sight (LOS), we showcase the potential of LoRaWAN transmissions to achieve communication distances exceeding 130 km in a LOS-free scenario over the ocean. These findings highlight the promising capabilities of LoRaWAN for reliable and long-range maritime communication of sensing data.

LoRaWAN and Urban Waste Management-A Trial.

The city of Lisbon, as any other capital of a European country, has a large number of issues regarding managing waste and recycling containers spread throughout the city. This document presents the results of a study promoted by the Lisbon City Council for trialing LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technology for the waste management vertical under the Lisbon Smart City initiative. Current waste management is done using GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) sensors, and the municipality aims to use LPWAN in order to improve range and reduce costs and provisioning times when changing the communications provider. After an initial study, LoRa (Long Range) and LoRAWAN (LoRa Wide Area Network) as its network counterpart, were selected as the LPWAN technology for trials considering several use cases, exploring multiple distances, types of recycling waste containers, placements (underground or surface) and kinds of commercially available waste level measurement LoRa sensors. The results showed that the underground waste containers proved to be, as expected, the most difficult to operate correctly, where the container itself imposed attenuation levels of 26 dB on the LoRa link budget. The successful results were used to promote the deployment of a city-wide LoRa network, available to all the departments inside the Lisbon City Council. Considering the network capacity, the municipality also decided to make the network freely available to citizens.