A low-power radio protocol that carries tiny bursts of data several kilometres, letting battery sensors run for years over a city-owned network.
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LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a wireless protocol built for the Internet of Things: it carries tiny amounts of data over several kilometres while sipping so little power that a battery sensor can run for years. It uses unlicensed radio bands (868 MHz in Europe), so a city can run its own network without paying for spectrum or a mobile contract.
That combination makes it a workhorse for cheap, city-wide sensing — often the radio backbone of an urban sensor network. Bad Nauheim uses LoRaWAN to track footfall, traffic and smart-bin fill levels; Gründau streams temperature and humidity from playground sensors into a live public heat map; and Alsfeld is building an open LoRaWAN platform for parking, air quality and heat across its old town.
The limitation is bandwidth. LoRaWAN moves only small, infrequent messages — fine for a temperature reading, useless for video — and legal duty-cycle limits cap how often each device may transmit. It is a sensing network, not a replacement for Wi-Fi or 5G.
16 documented projects in 14 cities name LoRaWAN in their own record — with the passage it was found in, and how each turned out: LoRaWAN across the atlas.
Added 2026-07-16 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary