# A Comprehensive Study of the Use of LoRa in the Development of Smart Cities
## 6 Conclusions  
The qualitative analysis carried out of scientific IoT-LoRa proposals from 2015 to 2019 indicates that these works were aligned to cover specific needs in the subcategories of agriculture, energy, environment, healthcare, industry, traffic, and waste management. However, according to the hypotheses presented in this work, most of the IoT solutions based on LoRa were integrated in a loose way. Thus, although a specific need of a subcategory of the smart city was being solved, it was not considered within a macro-plan for the development of a sustainable city. Rethinking the approaches of LoRa-IoT proposal on the basis of circular economy could contribute significantly to a macro-plan for the development of a sustainable city. The circular economy drives new business models and interactions in the city. By using the data generated by IoT solutions, it is possible to generate direct benefits for the industry and for local governments. In this paper, a qualitative analysis of LoRa was carried out about the development of smart city solutions related to different aspects of the city such as transportation, health monitoring, and pollution level measurements. For the qualitative analysis process, a systematic literature review of papers found in five scientific databases was executed, following the PRISMA methodology. Then, we analyzed the relevant aspects of LoRa guided by the IoT architecture model proposed by the ITU in its Y.2060 recommendation, in order to establish the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT)that support the selection of LoRa as the technology for the connectivity of IoT devices in smart city models. On the basis of this literature review, projects related to smart cities and LoRa were identified, which were classified in the smart health, smart traffic, smart environment, smart agriculture, and smart energy subcategories. Subsequently, we analyzed the projections of consulting firms in relation to the deployment of IoT for the next years till 2025, finding that the type of applications that are growing are similar to the subcategories that were identified in the literature review of this work, which allows us to assume that the research projects in the academic field are aligned with the current social and business needs. This coincides with the recent increase of the number of papers. LoRa is an unlicensed technology that allows creating a private network, and this is one of the main advantages of this technology. It also has other advantages such as a strong modulation scheme that makes it resistant to the Doppler effect, multipath fading, scalability in terms of number of nodes, adaptability to data frame length, and an end-to-end security architecture. These strengths allow LoRa to be one of the most selected LPWAN's technologies for the development of smart cities around the world. However, some security aspects, such as response to security attacks and vulnerability policies, still need be solved. The development of LoRa solutions present an industrial impact related to the projections in different subcategories of smart city such as energy, healthcare, and transportation; according to the predictions of recognized consulting firms in the world, increments of approximately 10% per year until 2025 are present in each subcategory of smart city, and higher investments are projected in the following years. In the academic field, there is a significant increase in the development of IoT LoRa solutions, which is reflected by the increased number of scientific publications, from about 30 scientific articles in 2016 to about of 400 in 2018. LoRa is an open, scalable, and flexible technology that allows interoperability between five relevant components for the construction of an intelligent city that considers sensors, complementary technologies, data science, citizen interaction, LoRaWAN, in order to obtain data and generate visibility on aspects related to subcategories of the smart city, such as smart health, smart agriculture, smart transportation, among others.