LoRaWAN for smart campus:deployment and long-term operation analysis

Abstract The recent years have gradually increased the value of wireless connectivity, making it the de facto commodity for both human users and the machines. In this paper, we summarize our experiences of deploying and managing for over two years the extensive indoor sensor network composed of more than three hundred devices connected over LoRaWAN low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology. We start by detailing the background and methodology of our deployment and then present the results of analyzing the network’s operation over a period of two years, focusing specifically on identifying the reasons after the packet losses. Our results reveal that despite the common assumptions, in a real-life network, the packets are lost not only during the on-air transmission but also within the backbone. Among the other interesting findings are the observed nonuniform distribution of the packet transmissions by the nodes in the networks, the seasonal effects on the packet delivery, and the observed effects of the interferences on network performance. The empirical results presented in the paper provide valuable insight into the performance of a real-life extensive LoRaWAN network deployed in an indoor environment and thus may be of interest both to the practitioners and academics

Large and dense LoRaWAN deployment to monitor real estate conditions and utilization rate

Abstract Internet of Things (ioT) drives today’s world towards digitalization allowing diverse and innovative use cases. These use cases are changing in a fundamental way how people are conducting their business in various verticals. In this paper we focus on the real estate use case. We deploy a monitoring system in a large open space at University of Oulu. The deployed system visualizes real estate conditions of this environment and gives insight to understanding a LoRaWAN IoT-enabled building. The number of the sensor nodes composing the deployed system reaches 331, with each node comprising five sensors providing information about temperature, humidity, CO₂, amount of light, and motion. In the paper we report the results and the lessons learned during the deployment of such an extensive LoRaWAN sensor network. Aside of the practicalities related to the deployment of the network, we characterize and report the performance of the deployed network. The conducted deployment can become a valuable reference for engineers and practitioners, deploying a real estate monitoring system with LoRaWAN

On the integration of LoRaWAN with the 5G test network

Abstract The major focus of the low power wide area networks (LPWAN) is to provide energy efficiency and large coverage to Internet of Things (IoT) applications that do not require a large bandwidth. There are several LPWAN technologies that can enable these functionalities such as SigFox, LoRa Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), and Weightless. The estimates of the number of wireless IoT devices in the near future are between 20 Billion to even 75 Billion. At the very same time the development and deployment of the 5th generation of mobile networks (5G) is rolling out. Among others, the new technology will deliver huge capacity which can be employed for enabling the backbone connectivity for LPWAN. Therefore, there is a need to have possibility to seamlessly integrate LPWANs with the upcoming 5G. In this work, we investigate how one can integrate the LoRaWAN with the 5G Test Network (5GTN) running in the University of Oulu, Finland. Furthermore, one of the options discussed is implemented in practice and its operation is verified. At the moment the implementation is used for wide range of other research activities beside this work, enabling a third party to bring their LoRaWAN compliant devices for testing and application development

NB-IoT micro-operator for smart campus:performance and lessons learned in 5GTN

Abstract In recent years, many new radio-based connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) have been proposed. At the same time, development towards the 6G has brought on the stage the new business concepts. One of them is the concept of a micro-operator and implies the local entities to act as the telecom infrastructure owner and provider in their premises. In the current paper, we discuss the deployment and report the practical performance of a single-cell NB-IoT deployed as a part of the 5G Test Network (5GTN) and controlled by a smart-campus micro-operator. The practical measurements reported in the paper have been carried in the University of Oulu within a huge interconnected indoor environment with the total floor area of 188 600 m^{2}$. Our results demonstrate that the NB-IoT technology is a viable connectivity solution for various non-critical machine-based applications deployed indoors, highlight the practical performance of this technology, and reveal some practical specifics and challenges of acting as an IoT micro-operator

Combining IoT Deployment and Data Visualization: experiences within campus maintenance use-case

Abstract The internet of things (IoT) application domain is evolving continuously and is expected to bring digitalization making everything smart. This paper presents reference architecture for IoT system. Moreover, full implementation of such architecture is demonstrated with the IoT testbed deployed at the University of Oulu. Leveraging MQTT protocol, LoRaWAN is utilized as an IoT enabler technology for our platform, comprising a cloud server as well. In addition, a hybrid server is added to the platform to enable enhanced performance and functionality. To showcase the potential impacts of augmented reality (AR) based applications in an IoT infrastructure, we implemented and tested the maintenance support application. The implemented application visualizes environmental conditions and the sensor node itself as an augmented object on a mobile phone. A user study is carried out to discuss and showcase the potential impacts of using such a visualization approach