Evaluation of low power wide area network technologies for smart urban drainage systems

Smart urban drainage systems (SUDS) with real-time control are considered to be one of the prominent approaches to tackle the impact of climate change which results in heavy rainfall and floods in urban areas. However, the lack of reliable and efficient communication with sensors buried underground is considered as one of the main deficiencies preventing ubiquitous application of SUDS. With the recent developments of new noise insensitive technologies for ultra-narrow band (UNB) and chirp spread spectrum (CSS) communication, introducing new low-power long-range communication technologies (e.g. NB-IoT, LoRa), implementation of such drainage systems is becoming feasible. This paper presents a comparative study of NB-IoT and LoRa and evaluate the potential of these technologies to be used for SUDS. The study is conducted in different underground scenarios such as dry and damp conditions to highlight the potential benefits offered by LoRa and NB-IoT in terms of coverage, information rate, and energy consumption. It has been shown through the simulation results that NB-IoT offers capillary coverage with a high level of scalability as compared to LoRa. Furthermore, NB-IoT also provide high information rate and low energy consumption and is best suited for underground scenarios.