Beyond Safety: Leveraging LoRa Communication in Urban Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) were pri-marily introduced to enhance vehicular safety by facilitating communication between vehicles and infrastructure, improving overall situational awareness. In VANETs, vehicles are expected to exchange numerous messages generated by various applications, which can be categorized into safety and non-safety applications. The primary communication technologies for VANETs, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and Cellular V2X (C- V2X), are mainly focused on delay-sensitive, safety-related applications. However, using the same bandwidth for both safety and non-safety applications can increase the load on the communication channel, potentially leading to higher latencies. This study examines the feasibility of using LoRa communication for non-safety-related urban VANET applications. Due to the long-range communication capability, we believe LoRa is ideal for VANET applications requiring low data rates and wider coverage. We conducted multiple real-world experiments to evaluate the performance of LoRa in different urban VANET scenarios. Our results indicate that LoRa can handle Doppler shifts caused by urban VANET speeds with both Spreading Factor (SF) 7 and 12, though higher SF is more susceptible to Doppler shifts. Additionally, our findings show that the Line-of-Sight (LoS) condition significantly impacts LoRa communication, especially with lower SF.