CLUES: Community-driven LoRa networks Urban sensing Empowered by Smart homes

Long-range and low-power networks play a crucial role in the development of smart cities. However, the centralized and vertically integrated Internet of Things (IoT) model, where municipalities or private entities deploy and manage devices effectively retaining ownership of the data, presents significant technological and operational barriers that have so far hindered the capillary deployment of the technology. To overcome these limitations, we propose an original bottom-up deployment model that decentralizes data and network ownership and reduces management and operational barriers. Community-driven LoRa networks Urban sensing Empowered by Smart homes (CLUES) advocates for a participatory and decentralized sensor network through the integration of a smart gateway into citizen’s smart homes. Crowd-sensed data captured by Smart Home Gateways (SHG) allows us to power local-scoped digital representations of sensors, augmenting their capabilities with data and services from edge devices. Gateways can participate in municipal networks and share sensed data with institutions and companies, fostering a cost-effective approach to the construction of city ecosystems. In particular, our proposal opens up new deployment and management models for low-power networks, providing better coverage and enabling more dense, scalable, and energy-efficient deployments. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach through a large-scale evaluation of a simulated deployment of the proposal and provide the community with an open-source implementation of the SHG.