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

Abstract

There are more than 1.3 billion vehicles around the world and rapidly growing which causing worldwide challenges such as congestion, huge fuel consumption, and emissions. The solution to these issues could be expansion of infrastructure or making efficient use of the current infrastructure using current technological advances by implementing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). In this paper, we proposed and explored the possibility of using cellular-based Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) communications, LTE-M and Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), for ITS applications. LTE-M and NB-IoT are designed to provide long-range, low power, and lowcost communication infrastructure and can be a viable promising option for immediate implementation in the real world. In order to understand the feasibility of using LPWAN for ITS, we investigated two applications with low and high delay requirements: road traffic monitoring and emergency vehicle management and preemption. 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 latency per user. SUMO traffic simulator has been used for realistic traffic generation and a Python-based program with the ability to live data exchange with SUMO has been developed for communication performance evaluations. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of using LPWAN for ITS backhaul infrastructure where it was in favor of the LTE-M over NB-IoT.