The search for a convergent option to deploy smart grids on IoT scenario

Smart city projects are quickly evolving in several countries as a feasible solution to the urban organization to provide sustainable socioeconomic growth and solve problems that arise as the populations of these cities grow. In this sense, technology application plays an important role in enabling automation of processes, improving the citizen’s quality of life and reducing the costs of public services for municipalities and enterprises. However, automation initiatives of services such as electricity, water, and gas which materialize by the so-called smart grids, have emerged earlier than smart city projects, and are consolidating in several countries. Although smart grid initiatives have arisen earlier to projects of smart cities it represents a subset of the great scenario of IoT that is the vision in which the smart city projects are based. The time difference from developments between these two initiatives made the alternatives of communication technologies for infrastructures construction of communication followed different paths. However, in view of the great scenery of IoT is desirable to determine technologies that provide convergence of a single urban communication infrastructure capable of supporting all applications, whether they are typically IoT or traditional smart grid applications. This work is a review which presents and discusses the two main technologies which are currently best positioned to play this role of convergence that is RF Mesh and LoRaWAN. The strengths and weaknesses of each one of them are also presented and propose that in actuality LoRaWAN is a promising option to offer the required conditions to take on this convergent position2356957

Indoor vehicles geolocalization using LoRaWAN

[EN] One of the main drawbacks of Global Navigation Satellite Sytems (GNSS) is that they do not work indoors. When inside, there is often no direct line from the satellite signals to the device and the ultra high frequency (UHF) used is blocked by thick, solid materials such as brick, metal, stone or wood. In this paper, we describe a solution based on the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology to geolocalise vehicles indoors. Through estimation of the behaviour of a LoRaWAN channel and using trilateration, the localisation of a vehicle can be obtained within a 20¿30 m range. Indoor geolocation for Intelligent Transporation Systems (ITS) can be used to locate vehicles of any type in underground parkings, keep a platoon of trucks in formation or create geo-fences, that is, sending an alert if an object moves outside a defined area, like a bicycle being stolen. Routing of heavy vehicles within an industrial setting is another possibility.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2018 , Spain, under Grant RTI2018-096384-B-I00.Manzoni, P.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano, J.; Hernández-Orallo, E. (2019). Indoor vehicles geolocalization using LoRaWAN. Future Internet. 11(6):1-15. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi11060124S11511

Understanding the limits of LoRaWAN

The quick proliferation of LPWAN networks, being LoRaWAN one of the most adopted, raised the interest of the industry, network operators and facilitated the development of novel services based on large scale and simple network structures. LoRaWAN brings the desired ubiquitous connectivity to enable most of the outdoor IoT applications and its growth and quick adoption are real proofs of that. Yet the technology has some limitations that need to be understood in order to avoid over-use of the technology. In this article we aim to provide an impartial overview of what are the limitations of such technology, and in a comprehensive manner bring use case examples to show where the limits are

Adaptive Geolocation of IoT devices for Active and Assisted Living

Recent developments in IoT devices and communication systems, have brought to light new solutions capable of offering advanced sensing of the surrounding environments. On the other hand, during the last decades, the average life expectancy has increased, which translates into a considerable rise in the number of elderly people. Consequently, in view of all these factors, there is currently a constant demand for solutions to support an Active and Assisted Living (AAL) of such people. The presented thesis intends to propose a solution to help to know the location of IoT devices that may be assisting people. The proposed solution should take into consideration the risk factors of the target group at each moment, as well as the technical constraints of the device, such as its available power energy and means of communications. Thus, ultimately, a profile-based decision should autonomously be made by the device or its integrated system, in order to ensure the usage of the best geolocation technology for each situation.Desenvolvimentos recentes em dispositivos IoT e em sistemas de comunicação, trouxeram consigo novas soluções capazes de oferecer uma deteção avançada dos ambientes circundantes. Por outro lado, no decorrer das últimas décadas, a esperança média de vida aumentou, o que se traduz também num considerável aumento do número de pessoas idosas. Por conseguinte, perante o conjunto destes factores, existe actualmente uma procura constante de soluções de suporte a uma Active and Assisted Living desse grupo de pessoas. A presente tese tenciona propor uma solução que ajude a conhecer a localização dos dispositivos IoT que possam estar a ajudar pessoas. A solução proposta deve ter em consideração os fatores de risco do grupo-alvo em cada momento e também as restrições técnicas do dispositivo, como a energia disponível e os meios de comunicação. Deste modo, em última instância, uma decisão baseada num perfil deve ser tomada autonomamente pelo dispositivo ou pelo seu sistema, para garantir a utilização da tecnologia de geolocalização mais adequada em cada situação

LoRaWAN geo-tracking using map matching and compass sensor fusion

In contrast to accurate GPS-based localization, approaches to localize within LoRaWAN networks offer the advantages of being low power and low cost. This targets a very different set of use cases and applications on the market where accuracy is not the main considered metric. The localization is performed by the Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) method and provides discrete position estimates on a map. An accurate "tracking-on-demand" mode for retrieving lost and stolen assets is important. To enable this mode, we propose deploying an e-compass in the mobile LoRa node, which frequently communicates directional information via the payload of the LoRaWAN uplink messages. Fusing this additional information with raw TDoA estimates in a map matching algorithm enables us to estimate the node location with a much increased accuracy. It is shown that this sensor fusion technique outperforms raw TDoA at the cost of only embedding a low-cost e-compass. For driving, cycling, and walking trajectories, we obtained minimal improvements of 65, 76, and 82% on the median errors which were reduced from 206 to 68 m, 197 to 47 m, and 175 to 31 m, respectively. The energy impact of adding an e-compass is limited: energy consumption increases by only 10% compared to traditional LoRa localization, resulting in a solution that is still 14 times more energy-efficient than a GPS-over-LoRa solution

Practical Experiences of a Smart Livestock Location Monitoring System leveraging GNSS, LoRaWAN and Cloud Services.

Livestock farming is, in most cases in Europe, unsupervised, thus making it difficult to ensure adequate control of the position of the animals for the improvement of animal welfare. In addition, the geographical areas involved in livestock grazing usually have difficult access with harsh orography and lack of communications infrastructure, thus the need to provide a low-power livestock localization and monitoring system is of paramount importance, which is crucial not for a sustainable agriculture, but also for the protection of native breeds and meats thanks to their controlled supervision. In this context, this work presents an Internet of things (IoT)-based system integrating low-power wide area (LPWA) technology, cloud and virtualization services to provide real-time livestock location monitoring. Taking into account the constraints coming from the environment in terms of energy supply and network connectivity, our proposed system is based on a wearable device equipped with inertial sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and LoRaWAN transceiver, which can provide a satisfactory compromise between performance, cost and energy consumption. At first, this article provides the state-of-the-art localization techniques and technologies applied to smart livestock. Then, we proceed to provide the hardware and firmware co-design to achieve very low energy consumption, thus providing a significant positive impact to the battery life. The proposed platform has been evaluated in a pilot test in the Northern part of Italy, evaluating different configurations in terms of sampling period, experimental duration and number of devices. The results are analyzed and discussed for packe delivery ratio, energy consumption, localization accuracy, battery discharge measurement and delay

A Study for Remote Monitoring of Water Points in Mauritania Based on IoT (LoRa) Technology

Wetlands in Mauritania contain the most important water sources necessary for the survival of rural communities in the country. In these areas, the main rural activities such as animal husbandry, agriculture, and fishing take place. Lack of water or flooding must be monitored to plan solutions in advance. After a comparative study of IoT wireless technologies, we proposed that LoRa technology is the most suitable for our field of application. However, in certain areas where access to the cellular network is difficult, we propose the addition of satellite communication in the LoRamonitoring system to achieve information collected at any point in the world via the cloud and the Internet. We carried out a practical case for the areas covered by the UMTS (3G) cellular network using devices integrating LoRaWAN to evaluate the performance of this technology. The results show the success of the communication over a distance of 14 km