A Novel Multi-Objective Approach to LPWAN Selection for Sustainable Smart City IoT

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-objective approach to selecting Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies for Internet of Things (IoT) services in sustainable smart cities. The study first clarifies the smart-city and IoT context, then reviews existing LPWAN research and compares LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT and LTE-M by coverage, energy consumption, data rate, payload size, quality of service, latency, deployment complexity and cost. A weighted average assessment is then applied to 13 typical smart-city tasks, including public lighting, waste management, smart agriculture, parking, transport, energy, safety and medicine. The scientific contribution of the paper is a transparent task-oriented evaluation model that converts heterogeneous LPWAN characteristics into comparable suitability scores. The practical contribution is a decisionsupport guideline for policymakers, municipal engineers and system architects who need to choose between private unlicensed LPWAN deployments and operator-managed cellular IoT networks. The results show that LoRaWAN has the highest universal indicator, while NB-IoT and LTE-M are preferable for tasks that require stronger quality of service, lower latency or deeper integration with mobile operator infrastructure.