LoRa on the Bus: Time and Location Monitoring System for Point-to-Point Buses

The current point-to-point (P2P) bus service system in the Philippines rarely provides information regarding the location of its buses or their estimated time of arrival (ETA) at the station. Hence, a system is needed to monitor the location of P2P buses to provide the necessary information to the commuters. This paper proposes a LoRa system with multi-hop capabilities that uses a RAK7246G WisGate Developer D0 for the gateway, Arduino MKR WAN 1300 boards for the end nodes, and U-Blox GPS NEO6MV2 Flight Control Module2 for the GPS module. Additionally, the system includes a dashboard, created using NodeRED, that displays vital information such as vehicle location, speed, and estimated time of arrival (ETA). The results show that the system was able to effectively perform up to two node-to-node hops when the packet being transmitted is outside the range of the gateway. Furthermore, the complete tests show that the system was able to provide speed and ETA data with an accuracy of ± 5 km/h and ± 5 minutes, respectively, when compared to the actual speed and travel time of the test vehicle based on a third-party application. The dashboard was also able to display the status of the bus regarding its movement, specifically if it was in transit or not based on its speed.