Performance of LoRa for Bike-Sharing Systems

Abstract

Today bike sharing systems are becoming popular in many cities as short-distance transit vehicles. More than 18 million bicycles are available worldwide for public use and one of the main problems that afflicts such sharing systems is the loss of bikes, which can be stolen or simply left in unknown locations. Thus, many bikes are docked or tracked using GPS and costly cellular connections.In this paper, we consider the emerging Long Range (LoRa) technology for use in bike sharing systems. LoRa exploits free ISM bands and has been conceived for low power and low data rate applications. Additionally, LoRa is characterized by large cells and heterogeneous application domains, which may lead to extremely high numbers of devices coexisting in the same cell. Thus, in this paper we study the scalability limits of a typical LoRa cell, showing that the performance of LoRa in crowded scenarios can be quite limited when using high spreading factors (SFs). Then, we design and realize a prototype of LoRa tracker module that can be embedded in a bike and we test its use in a large area of Palermo city, Italy. According to our knowledge, this is the first paper that study the performance of LoRa for bike sharing systems.

GNSS-Free Outdoor Localization Techniques for Resource-Constrained IoT Architectures: A Literature Review

“…Bike-sharing systems are another part of cities and bikes are assets and resources of cities. The authors in [130] mentioned that one of the problems that afflicts bike-sharing systems are the loss of bikes. They study in simulation the scalability limits of a typical LoRaWAN for bike-sharing systems and showed that the performance of LoRaWAN in crowded scenarios can be quite limited when using high SFs and that fading has a moderate impact on the cell capacity.…”

Crane monitoring system based on internet of things using long range

“…When the utilization percentage of the crane and the health status of the crane are known, then future management, maintenance, and planning will be able to be executed to prevent an unexpected event like crane shutting down or accidents that will cause a delay to the working schedule. Internet of things (IoT) had been implemented in various monitoring projects using different kinds of wireless technologies and sensors [2]- [12]. Previous research show long range (LoRa) can operate at a maximum distance of around 300 meters due to the types of antennas used in the projects, where normally a good quality of LoRa antenna can reach up to a few kilometers of distances [13], [14].…”

A Low-Cost Web Interface for Object Tracking Based on a Wireless Sensor Network

“…The conventional WSN implementation for tracking applications involves 2G/3G mobile network [4]. However, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) technologies offer a lower power consumption [4,6]. In particular, LoRa allows a wide coverage area (i.e., 1-10Km [5]), with low consumption [7] using unlicensed spectrum bands (i.e., low-ers system operating costs [8]).…”