An Experimental Study on the Use of LoRa Technology in Vehicle Communication

Among the profound changes that will come with the Internet of Things is vehicular communication. Shortly the vehicles will be connected between themselves (V2V) and their infrastructure. For the full achievement of these objectives, the challenges of new technologies are enormous due to the requirement of high reliability, high speed, and low latency. None of the technologies under development for this application has reached a satisfactory stage be assumed to as definitive. The LoRa technology, operating at frequencies below 1 GHz, presents a good signal spread and penetration in obstacles. It has a considerable range, open-source, simple, robust, and low-cost hardware, vast configuration possibilities, and applications, ranging from medicine to agriculture, do not use licensed bands. The tests proved to have good reach even in a dense urban environment. They can become a viable alternative in applications that require short message transmissions with few characters that do not require the constant sending of information packages. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the communication between V2I, V2V, and stationary vehicles using LoRa technology in field tests with measurements of signal strength, reception ratio, and signal-to-noise ratio. It will be using different SF (scattering factors) inherent to LoRa (SF7 and SF12) and evaluate the influence of the Doppler effect on communication.

Automated summary

Vehicular communication is undergoing profound changes with the Internet of Things, with LoRa technology proving to be a viable solution for short message transmissions in urban environments. Its low cost, open-source nature, and wide range of applications make it an attractive option for V2V and V2I communication.