Invited Paper: Towards Enabling City-Scale Internet of Things - Challenges and Opportunities

A leading contender to network low-power Internetof- Things (IoT) devices at city-scale are low-power wide-area networks (LP-WANs) which provide communication over large distances with minimal power consumption albeit with small throughput. The sheer scale of deployment and multitude of wireless impairments at such large range opens up a new host of associated challenges and opportunities to enable novel sensing applications. In this paper, we describe our vision for a cloud-based LP-WAN infrastructure which enables these capabilities and our work towards solving some of the key challenges associated with such a network. We also highlight the massive opportunity LP-WANs provide to enable novel applications which are challenging to deploy using conventional wireless technologies. We finally present our vision of future connected cities and the key role that LP-WANs will have in realizing it.