Transmission Technologies Comparison for IoT Communications in Smart-Cities

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is boosting a great amount of new applications unimaginable short time ago. However, typical smart-city scenarios pose serious difficulties for providing connectivity to end-devices. Thus, a novel transmission technology, known as LP-WAN (Long Range - Wide Area Network), has attracted great attention during the last times due to its long-range transmission capabilities while preserving the end-device's energy consumption. This proposal is at its first stages of development, so comparative studies are needed in order to evaluate its validity over well-established solutions. For that reason, in this work we present an experimental performance evaluation of one the most extended LP-WAN-enabling modulation technologies, LoRa (Long Range). We compare its performance with that attained by the short-range modulation FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) in typical smart-city scenarios. Thereafter, the focus is exclusively on LoRa, so a coverage range study with different modulation configurations is presented. The obtained results suggest the superior performance of LoRa over FSK under adverse transmission conditions. Moreover, promising transmission ranges over 7 km in suburban scenarios were attained.