LoRaWAN and Urban Waste Management—A Trial

Abstract

The city of Lisbon, as any other capital of a European country, has a large number of issues regarding managing waste and recycling containers spread throughout the city. This document presents the results of a study promoted by the Lisbon City Council for trialing LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technology for the waste management vertical under the Lisbon Smart City initiative. Current waste management is done using GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) sensors, and the municipality aims to use LPWAN in order to improve range and reduce costs and provisioning times when changing the communications provider. After an initial study, LoRa (Long Range) and LoRAWAN (LoRa Wide Area Network) as its network counterpart, were selected as the LPWAN technology for trials considering several use cases, exploring multiple distances, types of recycling waste containers, placements (underground or surface) and kinds of commercially available waste level measurement LoRa sensors. The results showed that the underground waste containers proved to be, as expected, the most difficult to operate correctly, where the container itself imposed attenuation levels of 26 dB on the LoRa link budget. The successful results were used to promote the deployment of a city-wide LoRa network, available to all the departments inside the Lisbon City Council. Considering the network capacity, the municipality also decided to make the network freely available to citizens.

Waste Management in the Smart City: Current Practices and Future Directions

“…Long-range wide area network technologies enable smart waste management solutions, such as smart bins and drop-off containers equipped with sensors, to collect data regarding their status [104,[149][150][151][152]. This integration aids in designing dynamic waste collection routes, decreasing operational costs, and curtailing environmental pollution.…”

IoTMapper: A Metrics Aggregation System Architecture in Support of Smart City Solutions

“…There are multiple open source implementations of LoRaWAN available. The things network (TTN) offers a community developed and operated solution for a LoRaWAN server as a service that gateways and devices operators may freely use [ 3 , 20 , 21 , 22 ].…”

“…In order to support the smart city verticals, different LPWAN technologies have been developed. Examples of these communication protocols, in common use to support smart cities solutions [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ], are: Long range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]: The complementary network layer to the LoRa technology, which, by itself, only specifies the physical layer of the communications stack. Sigfox [ 6 ]: An alternative network with the same aim, based on a closed business model, in which the network is always supported by an operator, also called Sigfox.…”

“…The validation of theLoRaWAN architecture present in Lisbon is particularly considered. This particular deployment is freely available, and there is a previous body of work in the study and development of solutions using this deployment, such as in urban waste management [ 3 ]. The authors, however, believe that their approach is applicable to any urban environment.…”

Smart Control and Energy Efficiency in Irrigation Systems Using LoRaWAN

“…Smart street lighting systems using an LPWAN control was realised by Sánchez-Sutil et al [9,10]. Finally, Cruz et al [11] monitored the filling level of urban waste containers in Lisbon (Portugal) using LPWAN technology. Ritesh-Kumar et al [12] applied LoRaWANs to implement a greenhouse control system that enables energy and water savings through continuous monitoring of the installation.…”