A municipal LoRaWAN deployment covering 2,490 parking, air-quality, and streetlight sensors across 46 km² — network architecture, US915 spectrum and airtime-capacity engineering, gateway coverage planning, and a battery-life calculation that shapes the actual hardware chosen.
The project brief: a mid-sized city deploying on-street parking occupancy sensors, air-quality monitoring nodes, and smart streetlight controllers across its incorporated area, all sharing one LoRaWAN network rather than three separate systems. This module walks why LoRaWAN — not cellular, not Wi-Fi — fits thousands of battery-powered devices reporting infrequently, and every layer of the design that follows from that choice: end device, gateway, network server, and application server architecture; the US915 FHSS spectrum rules and a worked airtime-budget calculation that proves the network has capacity headroom; gateway placement sized to real downtown propagation, not LoRa's theoretical link budget; and a battery-life calculation that directly drove the parking sensor's battery selection.
The full worked numbers — time-on-air calculations, the network capacity analysis, the battery-life engineering, and the fault-detection logic that turns a missed heartbeat or a zero-current reading into a work order — plus the complete bill of materials, are part of the unlocked module below.