Reducing Operation Cost of LPWAN Roadside Sensors Using Cross Technology Communication

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is an emerging communication standard for Internet of Things (IoT) that has strong potential to support connectivity of a large number of roadside sensors with an extremely long communication range. However, the high operation cost to manage such a large-scale roadside sensor network remains as a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose LOC-LPWAN, a novel optimization framework that is designed to reduce the operation cost using the cross technology communication (CTC). LOC-LPWAN allows roadside sensors to offload sensor data to passing vehicles that in turn forward the data to a LPWAN server using CTC aiming to reduce the data subscription cost. LOC-LPWAN finds the optimal communication schedule between sensors and vehicles to maximize the throughput given an available budget of the user. Furthermore, LOC-LPWAN optimizes the fairness among sensors by allowing sensors to transmit similar amounts of data and preventing certain sensors from dominating the opportunity for data transmissions. LOC-LPWAN also provides an option that allows all sensor to transmit data within a specific delay bound. Extensive numerical analysis performed with real-world taxi data consisting of 40 vehicles with 24-hour trajectories demonstrate that LOC-LPWAN improves the throughput by 72.6%, enhances the fairness by 65.7%, and reduces the delay by 28.8% compared with a greedy algorithm given the same budget