A Comprehensive Study of the Use of LoRa in the Development of Smart Cities

Abstract

The New Urban Agenda (Agenda 2030) adopted at the United Nations Conference related to Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in the year 2016 has the goal of prompting cities to achieve the identified Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030. In this context, cities can experiment strategies of circular economy for the optimization of resources, waste reduction, reuse, and recycling. The data generated by the components of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem can contribute in two relevant ways to a smart city model: (1) by the generation of a circular economy and (2) by the creation of intelligence to improve the decision-making processes by citizens or city managers. In this context, it is in our interest to understand the most relevant axes of the research related to IoT, particularly those based on the LoRa technology. LoRa has attracted the interest of researchers because it is an open standard and contributes to the development of sustainable smart cities, since they are linked to the concepts of a circular economy. Additionally, the intention of this work is to identify the technological or practical barriers that hamper the development of solutions, find possible future trends that could exist in the context of smart cities and IoT, and understand how they could be exploited by the industry and academy.