## 3 Application Characteristics
Such application may include the measurement of many parameters such as environmental: humidity, temperature, pollution level, noise level; advanced metering infrastructure: electricity, gas, water meters; intelligent roads and transport parameters: traffic density in spacio-temporal pattern, smart parking, best route selection, manhole cover monitoring; road condition and bridges monitoring; intelligent street lights; intelligent homes: automated light control, temperature control, fire and smoke monitoring, security and alarm systems; and smart buildings: structural health monitoring, water tank monitoring, elevator monitoring, trash collection and waste management, security and safety, and many more. Clearly, large numbers of LPWAN nodes are required for smart city applications, and hence the network should have large capacity and scalability. Applications like smart city may not be too concerned about monetary implications in an urban environment. Many of these nodes can be powered through a power line and, even if they are battery operated, in most of the cases, replacement of batteries is possible, and hence low power consumption requirement is at a moderate level. Enhanced characteristics required for smart city applications could be important in several ways such as heterogeneity of devices and software platforms, varied radio coverage requirement, co-existence and interference mitigation. Table 2 provides the relevance of the major characteristics to the selected applications mentioned above [4; 5]. In addition to the primary categories of coverage, capacity, cost, and low power operation, another characteristics area titled 'enhanced characteristics' is added. This covers the additional features that may be needed for a specific application. The relative scales for applicability of the characteristics to the application are high (H), medium (M), and low (L). For an LPWAN solution targeted towards a given application, the table provides the tradeoffs for architectural and design decisions. Coverage is of fundamental value to almost all LPWAN applications, and hence it is identified to be of high relevance for most of them. However, a typical manufacturing environment may entail localized operations. In such a case, tradeoffs may be carried out to focus on the types and number of devices to be supported, and coverage requirement may be compromised. Low power operation is driven primarily by the non-availability of electric power supply, for example, agricultural applications. In such situations, various sensors are far out and sometimes in difficult to reach locations, and hence batteries lasting 10+ years without recharging are needed. Low power operation is considered to \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Applications** & **Coverage** & **Capacity** & **Cost** & **Low Power** &
\begin{tabular}{c} **Enhanced** \\ **Characteristics** \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline Smart Cities & H & H & H & M & H \\ \hline Smart Environment & M & H & H & H & M \\ \hline Smart Water & H & M & M & M & L \\ \hline Smart Metering & H & H & H & M & L \\ \hline Smart Grid and Energy & H & H & M & M & M \\ \hline Security and Emergencies & H & L & M & H & H \\ \hline Retail & H & H & H & L & M \\ \hline Automotives and Logistics & H & H & M & L & H \\ \hline Industrial Automation and Smart Manufacturing & L & H & H & L & L \\ \hline Smart Agriculture and & H & H & M & H & L \\ Farming & & H & M & L & L \\ \hline Smart Homes/Building and & & & & & \\ Real Estate & H & M & L & L & L \\ \hline eHealth, Life Sciences, and & & & & & \\ Wearables & H & H & M & H & H \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Relevance of characteristics to applications. H, high; M, medium; L, low. be of high significance in such applications. In others, for example, retail, electric power may be readily available, and low power operation may be considered of low priority.