Smart City Technology

 

We can say that the future Cities are built from the ideas. A successful smart city will depend upon driving innovative solutions across six domains: economy, environment and energy, government and education, living and health, safety and security, and mobility.

The potential of Smart Cities is limitless & is growing exponentially all over the world with the rise of the technology.

Smart cities rely on IoT which is a network of connected devices such as connected sensors, lights, and meters to collect and analyze data. The data from these sensors or devices is then collected on a cloud server. The cities then utilize this data to improve by monitoring the infrastructure, public utilities and services, and more.

Smart City is a crucial part of development & economic growth. IoT based Smart City has evolved as a boon to the society. It utilizes information & communicates over the frequency channels which increase the operational efficiency by monitoring the data. This overall results in the citizen welfare along with the enhanced government services.

The following are the outcomes of Smart Cities:

• Effective decision-making based on data.
• Creation of safer communities.
• Improved urban transportation.
• Improving the environment through various systems.
• Evolution towards the Internet of Things (IoT).
• Implementation of new business opportunities.
• Automatic and efficient urban management. 
• Reduction of both economic and natural input costs.

These are some Smart City technologies which makes our tasks easier & more efficient:

Utility Management: The Smart meters attach to buildings, homes & connect to smart grid to manage the energy flow more effectively. For example, Smart Water Meters, Smart Energy Meters

Traffic Management: Smart Parking & Smart Asset Trackers contributes in the saving of fuel & time as well as ease of monitoring the overall traffic.

Lighting Management: The Street Lights are controlled through a controller based on LoRaWAN, which can be efficient for energy saving. Street lights can be connected with sensors to turn on and off depending on where there’s an activity or when it’s daylight in the city to save energy.

A smart city with IoT can help achieve this goal by providing real-time data about the state of urban infrastructure.

By 2050, 68% of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas. Smart cities can enhance society through innovations and digital transformations. Hence In a world of continuous disruption, cities need to be dynamic and adaptive through technology.

Simplifying Wireless IoT Gateway

There are a lot of things to unbox while exploring through the LoRaWAN technology. Each and every part is crucial & interesting to know more about. The LoRaWAN Gateway is one of them, which communicates over multi-channels with multi-spreading factors.

A gateway typically refers to the physical box or encasement housing the hardware and application software that performs essential tasks to connect IoT devices to the cloud. IoT devices use a gateway as a central hub to drop sensed knowledge and connect that data to external networks hence also termed as a “Data Concentrator”.

A gateway is much like a Wi-Fi router. It has a LoRa concentrator, which allows it to receive RF signals sent out by LoRaWAN devices, which get converted to a signal compatible with a server, such as Wi-Fi, to send data to the cloud.

With this technique, end devices simultaneously communicate with the gateway using different channels and data rates without pre-negotiation and enabling the gateway to accommodate about 10,000 end-devices at the same time. However, in the multi-data rate channel mode, the gateway is limited to a 125 kHz bandwidth with eight channels, even if the maximum bandwidth of LoRa is 500 kHz.

The IP traffic from a gateway to the network server can be backhauled via Wi-Fi, hardwired Ethernet or via a Cellular connection. LoRaWAN gateways operate entirely at the physical layer and, in essence, are nothing but LoRa radio message forwarders.

 For LoRaWAN downlinks, a gateway executes transmission requests coming from the LNS without any interpretation of the payload. Since multiple gateways can receive the same LoRa RF message from a single end device, the LNS performs data de-duplication and deletes all copies. Based on the RSSI levels of the identical messages, the network server typically selects the gateway that received the message with the best RSSI when transmitting a downlink message because that gateway is the one closest to the end device in question.

LoRaWAN-A Scalable Technology

Our awareness for the LoRaWAN technology, is the key towards the developments & innovations in the field. This ensures the way forwards to Smart & Secure future. Let us dive into the reasons, why LoRaWAN technology is trending & drifting all of us to the higher level.

LoRa is basically a RF wireless modulation technique & essentially a way of manipulating radio frequency waves with Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) technology. It encodes information similar to the way dolphins and bats communicate! LoRa modulated transmission is robust against disturbances and hence can be received across great distances.

Therefore, main advantages of LoRa are its long-range capability and its affordability. For example, a general use case for LoRa in industrial space and smart cities, where low-powered and inexpensive internet of things devices (typically sensors or monitors) spread across a large area sends small packets of data sporadically to a central administrator. These are not alarming words but are essential to be familiar with. The feasibility & flexibility of the technology depends on some factors, illustrated below.

Spreading Factor (SF)

The chirp spread spectrum technology uses so-called “chirps”. The spreading factor (SF) determines the speed of a chirp. In general terms, the amount of spreading code applied to the original data signal is termed as “Spreading Factor”.

Lower spreading factor means faster chirps & therefore higher data transmission rate at the same bandwidth & time and a high SF means a broadcast has higher range, at the cost of increased power consumption.

Lower SF means more chirps are sent per second; hence, you can encode more data per second. Higher SF implies fewer chirps per second; hence, there are fewer data to encode per second. Compared to lower SF, sending the same amount of data with higher SF needs more transmission time, known as airtime (Time On Air).

LoRa modulation has total of 6 spreading factors from SF7 to SF12 and it influences the data rate, time on air, battery life & receiver sensitivity. The  below table shows how spreading factors affects the receiver sensitivity.

Data Rate (Spreading Factor)	Sensitivity	Time On Air
SF7	-123.0 dBm	41 ms
SF8	-126.0 dBm	72 ms
SF9	-129.0 dBm	144 ms
SF10	-132.0 dBm	288 ms
SF11	-134.5 dBm	577 ms
SF12	-137.0 dBm	991 ms

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Larger spreading factors mean larger processing gain, and so a signal modulated with a larger spreading factor can be received with less errors compared to a signal with a lower spreading factor, and therefore travel a longer distance.

It uses the unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) radio bands for network deployments.

On security point of view, an end device can connect to a network with LoRaWAN in two ways:

• Over-the-air Activation (OTAA): A device has to establish a network key and an application session key to connect with the network.
• Activation by Personalization (ABP): A device is hardcoded with keys needed to communicate with the network, making for a less secure but easier connection.

Hence, concluding that LoRaWAN benefits are undeniable in today’s IoT landscape.