# LPWAN-Based Vehicular Monitoring Platform with a Generic IP Network Interface
## 1 Introduction  
Monitoring systems have definitely evolved since the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm [1]. Old-fashion complex supervision systems are now being replaced by more recent wireless cost-effective solutions that permit control and observation of a wide range of elements or events, almost in real-time and from any place with a connection to the Internet. Many technological advances have contributed to improvements in this field, but two have been decisive for its quick implantation, namely: (i) The development of low-cost and energy-efficient monitoring devices, and (ii) the progress of communication technologies to match the requirements of these systems, such as long-range and robust transmissions. Cheap and easy-to-use hardware platforms are now available on the market, and are reaching the general public. Example of these devices are the Arduino or Raspberry Pi boards, which arecapable of performing functions that only some years ago needed industrial hardware. Thereby, these platforms allow easy monitoring of physical events by themselves, or they may be connected to larger systems with the aim of extracting monitoring data. Thereafter, the collected data are forwarded to centralized control systems, usually through wireless links. Thus, regarding the wireless transmission technologies employed in these architectures, some features are of prominent importance in order to boost the deployment of both reliable and practical monitoring systems. These characteristics are related to the need of having long-range communication solutions with very low energy consumption for end-devices, because they are usually powered by batteries. Another desirable feature is system scalability, as it is envisioned that billions of end-devices will be simultaneously connected within future IoT architectures [2]. In this line, one communication technology that meets these demands, and that is fully integrated within the IoT ecosystem since its inception, is the Low Power-Wide Area Network (LPWAN). This recently-proposed communication alternative promises long transmission distances (over 15 km in rural environments), long end-device lifetime in years, and high scalability, which permits the connection of hundreds or even thousands of end-nodes concurrently to a single base station [3]. For these reasons, LPWAN solutions are attracting the attention of both the research community and industry [4; 5]. Among the different technologies following the LPWAN paradigm, LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) has become one of the most adopted solutions, due to its flexibility and characterization possibilities [3]. One vertical that is experiencing a considerable revitalization since the appearance of IoT-related services and the upcoming 5G is the vehicular sector [6]. Under the umbrella of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) paradigms, many novel services will take advantage of the rich variety of connectivity options that vehicles will present in the near future [7]. The integration of different communication technologies on-board vehicles will enable the development of solutions in many areas, such as safety, green transport, goods or fleet monitoring, and traffic analysis, among others. Although some efforts were done in these directions some years ago, during the emergence of IEEE 802.11p-based technologies, the need for deploying dedicated infrastructures, together with the limited range of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications and the penetration rate issue, lead to a deceleration of these initiatives [8]. For that reason, the integration of a series of Radio Access Technologies (RAT) in a single on-board control system has been envisioned as a promising step in gathering all of the services and applications mentioned above, which are highly related to the concept of smart cities or, in general, smart spaces [9].