2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and

Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress

LoRa Communication Maps of Medium-Sized

Rural City in Japan via Community Bus Services
Ken T. Murata Kohei Mizutani Yoshiaki Muroyama
National Institute of Information National Institute of Information National Institute of Information
and Communications Technology and Communications Technology and Communications Technology
Tokyo, Japan Tokyo, Japan Tokyo, Japan
ken.murata@nict.go.jp mizutani@nict.go.jp muroyama@nict.go.jp

Kazunori Yamamoto Kazuya Muranaga Takamichi Mizuhara

National Institute of Information Systems Engineering Consultants Co., Ltd. CLEALINKTECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd.
and Communications Technology Tokyo, Japan Kyoto, Japan
Tokyo, Japan muranaga@nict.go.jp mizuhara@clealink.jp
kaz-y@nict.go.jp

Praphan Pavarangkoon Kazuki Kobayashi

National Institute of Information Shinshu University
and Communications Technology Nagano, Japan
Tokyo, Japan kby@shinshu-u.ac.jp
praphan@nict.go.jp

Abstract—We conduct communication environment measure-
ment in Chikuma city, Nagano prefecture, Japan, utilizing com-
munity bus services via private Long Range (LoRa), which is one
of the low-power wide area (LPWA) communication technologies.
Chikuma city has approximately 119.8 km2 area and a population
of 59,380, which is a medium-sized rural city in Japan. In this
experiment, we set up LoRa relay stations at three locations in
the city: the Koshoku city hall building (at the northern part
of the city), the Togura municipal building (at the southern
part of the city), and the Amenomiya drainage station (at the
eastern part of the city). In addition, beacon transmitters are
installed in the community buses (nine routes in all). The location
and time information are transferred from the routes of the
buses to a cloud system in real time through the relay stations.
Experimental results are summarized in an area map, indicating
that we succeed in communicating in 61.3% of data points on the
bus routes and confirm the possibility of covering the entire city
by the LPWA. We are able to expand the LoRa communication
area by adding more relay stations paying attention to terrain
effects.
Keywords—LPWA; LoRa; communication map; Chikuma city
I. I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, new information communication technolo-
gies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, artificial
intelligence (AI), etc. are effective tools for enhancing services
and solving problems by utilizing the data of local residents.
IoT, which connects many sensors to the Internet, is an impor-
tant basic technology, and various regional IoT technologies
are being developed and promoted so far. Low-power wide-
area (LPWA) communication technology is capable of long
distance communication with low power consumption. It is
possible to operate autonomous sensors by solar power supply
and storage battery, and Long Range (LoRa) features long
distance propagation. LoRa is one of the regenerations of
the LPWA, which is known as has ability of long-distance
communication. Recently, a record of LoRa communication
over 700 km using LoRaWAN technique is reported in [1].
Surely on such an ideal condition as from one mountain top to
another mountain top, one may attain long-distance communi-
cations using LoRa. However, in general city areas, it is almost
impossible to present such ideal conditions. There are high-
altitude buildings, towers, and other artificial architectures.
Mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, and other geographic obstacles
also refrain from communicating in long distance.
Many trials have started to examine LoRa communications
in the city areas. Although there have been several attempts on
watching or monitoring urban or rural area using LoRa (e.g.,
[2]), the target area is limited and area maps are not disclosed
in most of the cases. In this paper, we conduct communication
environment measurement of the whole residential area of
Chikuma city, Nagano prefecture, Japan. Chikuma city has
approximately 119.8 km2 area and a population of 59,380,
which is a medium-sized rural city in Japan. In this exper-
iment, we first install LoRa relay stations at three locations
in the city. Then, using beacon transmitter equipped on the
community buses running on wide-area routes over the city, we
survey communication area of LoRa over the city. This paper
is composed of the following sections. Section II describes
experiment environments briefly. Section III presents a exper-

978-1-7281-3024-8/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1054

DOI 10.1109/DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech.2019.00189
iment in Chikuma city. Experimental results and discussion
are presented in Section IV. Finally, Section V concludes the
paper.
II. E XPERIMENT E NVIRONMENTS
Figure 1 shows an outlook of the private LoRa transceivers
used in this study. The antenna used in the transceiver has an
omnidirectional dipole one. The LoRa communication setting
parameters are shown in Table I. In this experiment, the
frequency bandwidth is set at 125 kHz, the spread spectrum
coefficient is set at the maximum of 12, and the transmission
output power is set at the maximum of 13 dBm. In general,
frequency band width is adjusted to, for example, 62.5 kHz
when there is interference in the urban area, and raised up to
500 kHz when the data rate is increased.
Figure 1. Outlooks of private LoRa communication devices:
Beacon transmitter (left) and Relay station (right).
TABLE I. Specification of LoRa setting parameters
Frequency bandwidth 62.5 kHz, 125 kHz, 250 kHz, 500 kHz
Spectral diffusion coefficient 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Transmission power -4 dBm, -3 dBm, . . ., 13 dBm
Figure 2. LoRa Communication Network.
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TABLE II. Specification of beacon transmitters
Data transmission Retransmission
Type # Memory size
interval data size
1 5 10 sec. 1 data 256 data
2 5 30 sec. 5 data 256 data
Figure 2 is a LoRa communication system diagram used
in this study. The beacon transmitter acquires position and
time information from the global navigation satellite systems
(GNSS) module and transmits them as a beacon signal. There
are two types of beacon transmitters (Table II). Type 1 trans-
mits a beacon signal every 10 seconds, and type 2 transmits
it every 30 seconds. When both types receive an ACK from
the relay station within 3 seconds after the transmission, it
is judged that the transmission is successful and the beacon
information is deleted from the memory on the transmitter. If
ACK can not be received within 3 seconds, the information
is stored in the memory and retransmitted as non-arrival
point information when the next communication succeeds.
The number of retransmission data transmitted simultaneously
with one regular data is 1 for type 1 and 5 for type 2. In
both types, the memory size is for 256 dataset storage, and
if memory data size exceeds the memory size, the oldest is
deleted from the memory. The beacon information received
by the LoRa relay station is delivered to the web server in
real time via the LTE/4G mobile network and visualized on
a geographic information system (GIS)-based web application
that will be introduced in Section IV for displaying the LoRa
communication area map. The web application is installed in
the NICT Science Cloud [3], [4] to display the status of the
LoRa communication environment from the bus route. This
web application has passed the security diagnosis by the same
cloud project [5].
III. E XPERIMENTS
The experiment was conducted in Chikuma city, Nagano
prefecture for 2 days on March 19 and 20, 2018. We install
LoRa relay stations to three locations as shown in Figs. 3: (a)
the Koshoku city hall building (at the northern part of the city),
(b) the Togura municipal building (at the southern part of city)
and (c) the Amenomiya drainage station (at the eastern part
of the city). The relay station boxes are bonded to the poles
or handrails on the rooftop of the buildings in a simplified
manner.
The locations of these three relay stations are indicated in
Fig. 4. Chikuma city is a rural city, and there are not so many
tall buildings and towers. We select these locations in terms
of the following policies:
• The relay station should be installed on the rooftop of
municipal buildings, since one of the future applications
of us is a regional disaster mitigation system that would
be operated by local government.
• The building should be higher than 10 m, and has a nice
panorama sight on the rooftop, as seen in Figs. 3(a), (b)
and (c).
 (a) Relay station at Koshoku.

(b) Relay station at Togura.

Figure 4. Community bus route map in Chikuma city and

locations of relay stations.

TABLE III. Ratio of successful LoRa signal to relay stations

Number of Number of
Relay station Arrival ratio
data successful data
(c) Relay station at Amenomiya. (a) Koshoku 5,778 3,436 59.5%
(b) Togura 5,599 3,494 62.4%
(c) Amenomiya 3,567 2,234 62.6%
Total 14,944 9,164 61.3%

of the city’s residential area, which is suitable for surveying

(d) Beacon transmitter installed at the bus front.
Figure 3. Relay stations and beacon transmitter installations.
• The buildings are chosen at the eastern, the middle and
the southern parts of the city to cover all of wide city
area.
Furthermore, as shown in Fig. 3(d), a small beacon trans-
mitter equipped with a GPS antenna was installed on the
dashboard ahead of the driver’s seat in the Chikuma city
community bus. As shown in Fig. 4, the Chikuma city
community bus route (9 lines in all) has a wide coverage
the whole city and creating LoRa communication area maps
throughout the city. In order to guarantee the reliability of the
experiment, in principle, measurements were conducted by bus
route circulation at least twice for community buses. During
the two days of experiments, we also conducted measurement
throughout the city by moving on foot, by bicycle, passenger
car and train as well, for the areas other than bus lines.
During and after the experiment, measurement results were
immediately checked on the LoRa area map web application.
IV. E XPERIMENT R ESULTS
A. Summary
Figure 5 shows the LoRa communication area map of
Chikuma city in this experiment. The area map is created
on a proprietary GIS Web application using CESIUM, an
open source geographical survey map [6]. Each point (small
dot) indicates the position of the beacon transmitter. The

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 Figure 5. LoRa communication area map.
colors correspond to the Received Signal Strength Indication
(RSSI) value which is the received signal intensity when
communication is successful to any relay station. When a
beacon signal successfully reaches to multiple relay stations,
the strongest signal RSSI value is displayed in color. The black
dots are communication disabled points. In this study, 61.3%
of data points are radio reachable (dotted in colors). Detail
results are shown in Table III.
In Fig. 5, it is comprehensive that the LoRa communication
area spreads throughout the city in this experiment at a
glance. This suggests that the LoRa communication is able
to be used for practical purposes in this medium-sized rural
city. Moreover, there are sporadic communication disabled
points (black spots) locally. In case of LoRa communication
using the 920 MHz band, depending either on temporary
direction change of the community bus (for example, when
the direction of the bus is behind the relay station) or on
bus location in the city (for example, a place in between
high buildings), radio wave occasionally does not reach to
any relay station. On the other hand, we are able to conclude
that an area where all neighboring points are filled with black
dots is a communication disabled area. For example, many
part of the roads in the Otawara line of Chikuma community
bus in Fig. 5, where most of the parts are mountain areas,
are communication disabled. In addition, the Goka area in
Fig. 5 is not a communication area despite the distance
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from Togura municipal building to the area is within LoRa
reachable distance (4 km) in north direction. Although the
cause is unknown, it is expected that the influence of the
building structure in the vicinity of the relay station antenna
(in particular, influence on multipath) can not be ignored. The
Goka area is one of the central areas in Chikuma city where
population is increasing, which is a practically unignorable
result in terms of governmental management. With regard to
such priority areas, it is effective to improve communication
coverage by adding multiple relay stations within or near the
area. Data communication improvement to or in such mountain
area is one of the future tasks of LoRa.
B. Terrain Effects
Figure 6(a)-(c) shows dependences of RSSI values on dis-
tance from three relay stations to the beacon transmitters in this
experiment. Only successful points where the beacon signals
are reachable to the stations are drawn in each panel in Fig. 6.
In this figure the RSSI values shows negative correlation to
the distance from relay stations, which is not contradictory
to our understanding of radio wave properties. However in
Fig. 6(c), one may find enhancements in the RSSI values in
the regions longer than 5500 m from the Amenomiya relay
station in Fig. 4(c).
Figure 7 shows the LoRa communication area map in the
same format with Fig. 5 but only of signals able or disable
to arrive at Amenomiya relay station as well as in Fig. 6.
 (a) Koshoku.
(b) Togura.
(c) Amenomiya.
(d) Topographic profile between Amenomiya relay station and JR
Obasute station.
Figure 6. Dependences of RSSI values of successful signal on
distance from three relay stations and topographic profile.
This figure is to discuss the influence of terrain on the LoRa
communication area to the Amenomiya drainage station. This
outstanding area corresponds to the slope of the west bank
of the Chikuma river in Fig. 7, which includes the Obasute
station of Japan Railway (JR) company. Figure 6(d) shows
a topographic profile on the line between Amenomiya relay
station and JR Obasute station. This topographic profile line
is depicted in Fig. 5. The altitudes of both (A) Amenomiya
drainage station and (B) JR Obasute station 7,500 m away
are 354 m and 548 m, respectively. The altitude of (c) west
bank of Chikuma river, where is 5,000 m away from the
Ameomiya drainage station, is 364 m that is almost same
as that of Amenomiya drainage station. Note that the RSSI
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Figure 7. Location and RSSI value to Amenomiya relay
station: only successful communication event.
Figure 8. Night view from JR Obasute station.
value at (C) is lower than that at (B). It corresponds to our
basic understandings that LoRa communication is generally
advantageous for locations with such high altitude and good
visibility. The JR Obasute station is famous as a beautiful land-
scape (night view) as shown in Figure 8, which complements
this experimental result.
C. Discussion
In terms of basic telecommunication technology, electro-
magnetic wave transmission properties are of interest. In our
design of regional LPWA networks, we need to survey radio
transmission and create communication maps on GIS tools.
Several reports have been opened that measure relationship
between wave intensity and distance [7]- [11]. Panels (a),
(b), and (c) in Fig. 5 indicate RSSI value dependence on
the distance for Koshoku, Togura, and Amenomiya relay
stations, respectively. In our outdoor experiments, it is hard
to estimate them since the environments are conducted on the
non-ideal conditions as discussed in Section IV.A. Multipath
effects inside on outside of the bus bodies are not negligible
as well. Taking these ambiguities into account, we evaluate
the intensity (RSSI value) and the distance between beacon
transmitters and three relay stations.
 It is hard to measure the expected number of the relay sta- [5] H. Watanabe, S. Ueno, and K. T. Murata, “A Method for Cooperation
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(LoRa), which is one of the low-power wide area (LPWA) [11] J. Haxhibeqiri, A. Karaagac, F. Van den Abeele, W. Joseph, I. Moerman,
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119.8 km2 area and a population of 59,380, which is a on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2017.
medium-sized rural city in Japan. As a result, it is found
that the residential area in the city is widely radio reachable
even by a small number (three) of relay stations of LoRa
communication. We succeeded in communicating in 61.3%
via our private LoRa communication toolkits.
The LoRa relay stations are attached to existing facilities
(poles and handrails) on the rooftop of buildings (city hall
building, municipal building, and drainage station building)
and therein special constructing technique was unnecessary. It
is noted that LoRa uses unlicensed frequency band, 920 MHz,
in this study. In other words, it suggests capability to construct
a region-watching LPWA network with high acceptability at
low cost. It is expected that there are many other municipalities
that can apply the methods and results of this experiment, since
the city is in medium size, typically structured, and facilitated
in Japan.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the city employees
and residents of Chikuma city for their help in con-
ducting experiments. We also thank Geospatial Informa-
tion Authority of Japan (GSI) for providing Global Map.
This research and development work was supported by the
MIC/SCOPE #165009001 and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Num-
ber JP17K00158. Part of this work was supported by JST
CREST Grant Number JPMJCR15K4, Japan.
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