Performance Analysis of LoRaWAN in an Air Quality Monitoring Applications for Smart Cities

Currently, people are very concerned with the quality of life in their cities, especially with the level of air quality. Due to this concern, this work aims to analyze the communication of Internet of Things (IoT) devices using Long-Range technology (LoRa) with the Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol for monitoring air quality and smart cities. In this context, factors such as distance between nodes, types of antennas and different Spreading Factor (SF) are considered. In addition, metrics Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Latency, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Packet Loss Rate (PDR) are collected from a real scenario in the city of Teresina in Brazil. Furthermore, a simulation to analyze the lifetime of the sensor nodes using energy consumption is run. Results show that the LoRaWAN technology proved to be a viable option, with low cost, low energy consumption, covering a distance of up to 2000 meters with packet loss rate of 0.3%, low SNR and latency of 23ms, with shipment of up to 12000 packages with node life of 2081 days, reaching a total consumption of 0.0105 mWh, even with all the barriers of the real scenario.