LPWAN-Based Hybrid Backhaul Communication for Intelligent Transportation Systems: Architecture and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Increased number of the vehicles on the streets around the world has led to several problems including traffic congestion in many regions. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) are a viable solution for this problem by implementing efficient use of the current infrastructures. In this paper, the possibility of using cellular-based Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) communications, LTE-M and NB-IoT, for ITS applications has been investigated. LTE-M and NB-IoT are designed to provide wide-range, low power and low cost communication infrastructures and can be a promising option which has the potential to be employed immediately in real systems. In order to to understand the feasibility of using LPWAN for ITS, two applications with low and high delay requirements have been examined: road traffic monitoring and emergency vehicle management. Then, the performance of using LTE-M and NB-IoT for providing backhaul communication infrastructure has been evaluated in a realistic simulation environment and compared for these two scenarios in terms of end to end delay per user. Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) has been used for realistic traffic generation and a Python-based program has been developed. This program has the ability to exchange live data with SUMO for communication performance evaluation. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of using LPWAN for ITS backhaul infrastructure mostly in favor of the LTE-M over NB-IoT.