Smart rural E-Bus system using global radio (GloRa)

Abstract

In this study, we focus on the electronic bus (E-Bus) system developed for Taiwan's mountainous areas. The rural area in Taiwan with its towering mountains has become a sightseeing hot spot. The radio propagation of a (cloud-based) 4G/LTE network may be severely limited by the mountainous geography, leading to unacceptable connection quality. We have built a smart (fog-based) local wireless E-Bus system using a feature-enhanced long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN, also known as GloRa in Taiwan). Since there is no electricity on the mountain roads, the bus stops of this E-Bus system are operated by a dynamo. Furthermore, we present a virtual direction and position algorithm for multiple E-Bus lines. A novel sensing method using the dynamos is proposed to estimate the feasibility of the E-Bus optimization problem.