Volume 7 - Issue 4
Integrating LP-WAN Communications within the Vehicular Ecosystem
- Ramon Sanchez-Iborra
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
ramonsanchez@um.es
- Jesus Sanchez-Gomez
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
jesus.sanchez4@um.es
- Jose Santa
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
josesanta@um.es
- Pedro J. Fernandez
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
pedroj@um.es
- Antonio F. Skarmeta
University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
skarmeta@um.es
Keywords: LP-WAN, LoRa, Vehicular Networks, Intelligent Transportation Systems
Abstract
Vehicular communications are attracting the attention of both the academy and industry since some
time ago. Most of the developed services rely on short-range communication technologies or on
non-vehicular oriented cellular solutions such as 4G. In turn, during the last times a long-range
transmission technology known as Low Power – Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) has gained great
momentum. LP-WAN solutions such as LoRa (Long Range) promise long coverage ranges of about
10 km with very low power consumption. Since these features can improve the performance of many
vehicular services, in this work the application of LoRa to the case of vehicular communications
is explored. The two typical vehicular network architectures, namely, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and
Vehicle-to-Vehicle, are considered. The results, extracted from an experimental test-bench, show
long coverage ranges never seen previously in vehicular environments. This opens the opportunity
for developing novel services and applications in this growing ecosystem.