LoRaWAN and Urban Waste Management—A Trial

The city of Lisbon, as any other capital of a European country, has a large number of issues regarding managing waste and recycling containers spread throughout the city. This document presents the results of a study promoted by the Lisbon City Council for trialing LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technology for the waste management vertical under the Lisbon Smart City initiative. Current waste management is done using GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) sensors, and the municipality aims to use LPWAN in order to improve range and reduce costs and provisioning times when changing the communications provider. After an initial study, LoRa (Long Range) and LoRAWAN (LoRa Wide Area Network) as its network counterpart, were selected as the LPWAN technology for trials considering several use cases, exploring multiple distances, types of recycling waste containers, placements (underground or surface) and kinds of commercially available waste level measurement LoRa sensors. The results showed that the underground waste containers proved to be, as expected, the most difficult to operate correctly, where the container itself imposed attenuation levels of 26 dB on the LoRa link budget. The successful results were used to promote the deployment of a city-wide LoRa network, available to all the departments inside the Lisbon City Council. Considering the network capacity, the municipality also decided to make the network freely available to citizens.