LoRa-Based IoT Applications in Smart Cities
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Internet of Things".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 45
Special Issue Editors
Interests: internet of things (IoT); smart city technologies and applications; wireless and sensor networks; mobility management in low-power devices
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: computational electromagnetics; silicon photonics; nanoantennas; 5G and 6G communications IoT; implementations of machine learning techniques in wireless networks
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Low-power-wide-area networks (LPWANs) have become a cornerstone of smart city digital infrastructures, offering scalable, energy-efficient, and cost-effective connectivity. Among these, LoRa and the LoRaWAN protocol stand out for their long-range communication, robustness in urban environments, and ability to support massive deployments of heterogeneous devices. They already enable a range of urban services such as water metering, waste management, air quality monitoring, traffic optimization, and infrastructure health assessment.
Yet, significant research challenges remain in moving from isolated pilot projects to resilient, city-wide LoRa deployments. Critical open issues include interference management in an unlicensed spectrum, energy consumption and lifetime optimization, latency and reliability for real-time services, and the resilience of physical layer protocols under dense urban conditions. Security and privacy are also pressing concerns, with IoT networks facing threats such as data breaches, intrusion, replay attacks, and denial-of-service attempts. At the same time, state-of-the-art approaches like machine learning, federated learning, and edge intelligence offer new opportunities for performance optimization, anomaly detection, and distributed decision-making. Looking forward, LoRa must evolve to integrate with 5G/6G infrastructures, support sustainable smart city goals, and enable future IoT paradigms such as digital twins and AI-native networks.
This Special Issue will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to address these multi-layer challenges, bridging theoretical research with practical deployments and highlighting measurable impacts on urban sustainability, resilience, and efficiency.
We welcome contributions on (but not limited to):
- Scalability and performance analysis of LoRa/LoRaWAN in dense urban environments;
- Adaptive MAC protocols, interference mitigation, and spectrum sharing in unlicensed bands;
- Physical layer enhancements: modulation, coding, MIMO, and waveform design for IoT/LPWAN;
- Energy consumption modeling, energy efficiency optimization, and lifetime analysis of IoT/LoRa networks;
- Latency, reliability, and QoS trade-offs for critical smart city IoT applications;
- Machine learning and AI-driven methods for optimization, anomaly detection, and traffic prediction in LoRaWAN;
- Federated learning and distributed intelligence for collaborative IoT/LoRa performance analysis and edge-based decision-making;
- Integration of LoRaWAN with 5G/6G, edge/fog computing, and hybrid multi-technology IoT systems;
- Security, privacy, intrusion detection, and lightweight cryptography for large-scale LoRa deployments;
- Data-driven performance analysis, benchmarking, and optimization for IoT/LoRa systems;
- Privacy-preserving mechanisms and secure data aggregation in smart city IoT applications;
- Future IoT/LPWAN prospects in the context of 6G, digital twins, and sustainable communications;
- Application-specific innovations in domains such as smart grids, mobility management, environmental sensing, and infrastructure health monitoring;
- Large-scale pilot projects and case studies demonstrating a measurable impact on urban operations.
We look forward to your contributions.
Dr. Zinon Zinonos
Dr. Spyros J. Lavdas
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- LoRa
- LoRaWAN
- LPWAN
- smart cities
- internet of things (IoT)
- physical layer and waveform design
- energy efficiency in IoT
- latency and reliability in LPWAN
- adaptive MAC protocols
- MIMO and cooperative communications
- scalability and interference management
- machine learning for IoT optimization
- federated learning and distributed intelligence
- IoT data analytics and performance evaluation
- intrusion detection and privacy-preserving IoT
- security and lightweight cryptography
- LoRa–5G/6G and Edge/Fog integration
- digital twins and sustainable IoT
- real-world IoT deployments
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