# Tracking and Monitoring System Based on LoRa Technology for Lightweight Boats
## 7 Conclusions  
Maritime communications may take advantage of the state-of-the-art communication technologies that are emerging under the umbrella of the IoT paradigm. For that reason, in this work, the use of LP-WAN solutions for providing ships with connectivity to land has been explored. The status of current existing solutions has been discussed and the advantages provided by these novel transmission technologies have been identified. Concretely, it has been found that the appropriateness of their use in boats with strong payload and energetic restrictions such as small sailboats or low-cost marine devices, e.g., radio-control boats.  
Therefore, an LP-WAN-based architecture has been proposed and a field experiment has been conducted in order to validate this proposal. A sampling campaign has been carried out in order to evaluate the performance of LoRa, one of the most promising LP-WAN technologies, with the aim of monitoring the activities of Optimist Class sailboats. A real LoRa-based network has been deployed in the port of Vigo (Spain). The attained results showed the validity of LoRa aiming at tracking ships' maneuvers and monitoring a series of parameters within the port. Different LoRa configurations have been tested and discussed, concluding that, under good transmission conditions, high data-rates should be used in order to reduce the time-on-air of the transmissions. In addition, good levels of transmission reliability (above 97% of PDR) were attained with the most robust LoRa configuration.  
A transmission range study has also been presented, showing a maximum distance of 4 km under the conditions of the deployed test-bench. We consider this distance long enough to monitor lightweight and small boats; hence, an online platform has been developed for the visualization of an Optimist Class race. Finally, the power consumption of end-devices has been evaluated, concluding that an autonomy of one day can be attained with low-cost batteries. As future work, we plan to extend this study in order evaluate the system performance in a different scenario, with bigger ships and, consequently, employing another piece of transmission equipment.  
[PERSON]-I. and A.F.S. designed the architecture and experiments. I.G.L. and C.S. led the implementation tasks. E.C. designed and deployed the cloud-based monitoring system. All the authors contributed to writing the paper.  
This work has been supported by the European Union under the framework of the H2020 IoTCrawler project (contract 779852) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the PERSEIDES (ref. TIN2017-86885-K) project. In addition, it has been developed thanks to the collaboration of the LifeDEMOWAVE (LTFE14 CCM/ES/001209), E-CORYDORA (ITC-20151038) and MARRISK (0262_MARRISK_1_E) projects, the Association Tecnologica A Industriosa, and the Marine Instruments' Regata Solar.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; nor in the decision to publish the results.  
Figure 13: Coverage study in the open sea in terms of received RSSI (dBm).