Low-Energy Smart Cities Network with LoRa and Bluetooth

Abstract

Integrating low-power profile networks, such as LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) and WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Networks), will economically enable new IoT (Internet of Things) applications for SC (Smart Cities). The technologies LPWAN LoRA and WPAN BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) are found in low-cost devices making use of unlicensed frequencies. The merge of their features would allow the emergence of applications that transmit long-range data (up to 45 km) using low energy consumption, low manufacturing cost, and simplified implementation, eliminating mobile operators dependence. In this work, we integrate LPWAN and WPAN using LoRa and BLE in a paradigm of Fog/Edge Computing, allowing the execution of the procedures at the edges of the network, making possible the transmission of only consolidated data to the cloud. We implemented a LoRa-BLE testbed using Lopy4 - Pycon, and simulated SC scenarios using LoRaSim. The set of results obtained by the testbed and the simulation allows us to evaluate the viability of merge LoRa-BLE to IoT SC applications.