LoRa©: applications and validations in complex urban environment

The large number of technologies that can be used in the Internet of Things (IoT) (LoRa, Sigfox, Nb-IoT, Wi-Fi,...) can lead to undoubted benefits in many areas. For example the use of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can lead to a decrease in polluting emissions or to an improvement in a company’s revenues due to a careful and automated management of resources. The presence of different technologies with different protocols that are used within the same field leads to the need of a standardization. The Long Range (LoRa) technology, and its protocol Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), is standing out among others due to its low power consumption and long communication range. The presence in the literature of a large number of papers that test the LoRa technology and that study its applications in various fields, attests to how this technology is leading in the IoT field. In this work, firstly, a comprehensive review of scientific articles has been conducted. This study focused on which use-cases were feasible with the LoRa communication technology. The selected papers have been divided into seven macro areas, taking into account the different applications: healthcare, environmental monitoring, disaster prevention, e-mobility, smart city and satellite communication. Particular attention has been given to applications in urban environment for which a higher amount of papers are available in the scientific literature. In the last part of this thesis numerical simulations have been carried out with the aim to verify the possibility to cover two specific areas of interest, namely a neighbourhood in a city and an inhabited stretch of coast. The characteristics of the Adafruit Feather 32u4m have been considered as transmitting and receiving node. The simulations put on display how the terrain configuration could affect the covering range.