Evaluation Of LoRaWAN In A Highly Dense Environment With Design Of Common Automated Metering Platform (CAMP) Based On LoRaWAN Protocol

Latest technological innovation in the development of compact lower power radios has led to the explosion of Internet of Things. With Wi-Fi, Zigbee and other physical layer protocols offering short coverage area there was a need for a RF protocol that had a larger coverage area with low power consumption. LoRa offers Long Range with lower power consumption. LoRa offers point to point and point to multipoint connections. with Single hop communication in place the need for routing protocols are eliminated. LoRa Wide Area Network stack can accommodate thousands of nodes under a single LoRa gateway with a single hop communication between the end nodes and LoRaWAN gateway. This paper takes an experimental approach to analyze the basic physical layer parameters of LoRa and the practical coverage offered by a LoRaWAN under highly dense urban conditions with variable topography. The insights gained from the practical deployment of the LoRaWAN network, and the subsequent performance analysis is used to design a novel public utility monitoring platform. The second half of the papers is designing a robust platform to integrate both existing wired sensor water meters, current and future generation wireless water meters. The Common Automated Metering Platform is designed to integrate both wired sensors and wireless (LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi) supported water meters. This integrated platform reduces the number of nodes under each LoRaWAN gateway and thus improves the scalability of the network. This architecture is currently designed to accommodate one utility application but can be modified to integrate multi-utility applications.