Extending SMS Service Coverage in Rural Areas by using LoRa Communication Technology

Abstract

Mobile phone services are provided by operators in cities and along the roads in rural areas. In the last case, the coverage can reach a few kilometers far from the roads, depending on the available mobile technology. In this way, rural population have limited coverage or lack of message-based communication systems In this work, we propose a solution based on low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies to extend the coverage of SMS service in rural areas in order to provide a message-based communication system. This communication system involves two devices called GSM node and remote node, and use three wireless communication technologies: GSM, LoRa and Bluetooth.
To guarantee effective packet transmission, several computational strategies are implemented in each embedded communication hardware, such as algorithms that analyze the service availability before message transmission or guarantee delivery of messages. The proposed scheme takes advantage of both communication systems, that operate in licensed bands in urban areas with good QoS and those that operate in non-licensed bands but with greater communication ranges.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation and evaluation of a system that allow to extend the SMS service coverage in rural areas based on LoRa technology. Several communication tests were implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. Results show the advantages of using low consuption and long range technologies to extend the SMS
service coverage in rural areas.