Search Results (24)

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the connectivity reliability of a LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network), deployed in a rural area of Mozambique, focusing on the influence of distance and relative altitude between end nodes and the gateway. The absence of telecommunications and power infrastructure in the study region provided a realistic and challenging scenario to assess LoRaWAN’s feasibility as a low-cost, low-power solution for remote sensing in disconnected environments. Field trials were conducted using an Arduino-based node (with 2 dBi antenna) powered by a 2200 mAh power bank, with no GPS or cellular support. Data were collected at four georeferenced points along a 1 km path, capturing Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and Packet Delivery Rate (PDR). Results confirmed that both distance and terrain elevation strongly affect performance, with significantly degraded metrics when the end nodes were located at lower altitudes relative to the gateway. Despite operational constraints, such as the need for manual firmware resets and lack of real-time monitoring, the network consistently achieved PDR above 89% and remained operational autonomously for over 24 h. The study highlights the effectiveness of installing gateways on natural elevations to improve coverage and demonstrates that even with basic hardware, LoRaWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network), is a viable and scalable option for rural connectivity. These findings offer valuable empirical evidence to promote national digital inclusion policies and future LPWAN deployments. Full article

Perishable product losses can occur throughout postharvest handling. Proper monitoring of key environmental conditions during this period is essential for predicting quality losses throughout their shelf life. This paper presents the design and testing of a portable and compact datalogger for the real-time monitoring of environmental conditions throughout the food supply chain. The device developed incorporates high-precision sensors to measure temperature, relative humidity, CO₂ concentration, luminosity and vibrations, as well as wireless communication capabilities for data transmission, simplifying real-time monitoring over existing multi-component systems while keeping costs affordable. Strategies to optimize power consumption allow a month of battery life, being able to cover entire periods of transport and storage, according to the results of the autonomy test performed on the device. The datalogger uses NB-IoT and relies on other wireless communication protocols if not available to send sensor data to a cloud platform. Comparative testing with commercial dataloggers has been carried out to verify correct device measurements, and field testing has validated successful real-time data transmission along an entire refrigerated transport route. The functionality and autonomy of the proposed device meet the needs of live remote monitoring to help reduce food losses. Full article

Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies as part of IoT are gaining a lot of attention as they provide affordable communication over large areas. LoRa and Sigfox as part of LPWAN have emerged as highly effective and promising non-3GPP unlicensed band IoT technologies while challenging the supremacy of cellular technologies for machine-to-machine-(M2M)-based use cases. This paper presents the design goals of LoRa and Sigfox while throwing light on their suitability in congested environments. A practical traffic generator of both LoRa and Sigfox is introduced and further interpolated for understanding simultaneous operation of 100 to 10,000 such nodes in close vicinity while establishing deep understanding on effects of collision, re-transmissions, and link behaviour. Previous work in this field have overlooked simultaneous deployment, collision issues, effects of re-transmission, and propagation profile while arriving at a number of successful receptions. This work uses packet error rate (PER) and delivery ratio, which are correct metrics to calculate successful transmissions. The obtained results show that a maximum of 100 LoRa and 200 Sigfox nodes can be deployed in a fixed transmission use case over an area of up to 1 km. As part of the future scope, solutions have been suggested to increase the effectiveness of LoRa and Sigfox networks. Full article

In the ever-evolving construction industry, the incorporation of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) through Low-power Wireless Area Networks (LPWAN), such as LoRaWAN, has emerged as a practical solution for addressing the challenges posed by the limited 5G cellular coverage found in solutions like NB-IoT and LTE-M, especially when deployed in remote locations. Open-source LPWAN platforms like The Things Network (TTN) and ChirpStack have played a pivotal role in fostering the adoption of LoRa technology by providing a mature and cost-effective ecosystem that facilitates efficient device resource management. Within this context, maintaining continuous surveillance of LPWAN network gateways becomes critically important, requiring a meticulous examination of status indicators and an evaluation of the communication quality. This paper introduces a structured approach for extracting data from TTN to create a comprehensive gateway monitoring system. The methodology encompasses various aspects, including ensuring seamless server connectivity, specifically focusing on efficient information management and integration of real-world construction data. This foundational work sets the stage for a more in-depth exploration of the diverse management components within the network ecosystem. Full article

According to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), about a third of all food produced for human consumption in the world is lost or wasted—approximately 1.3 billion tons. Among this, the amount lost during the storage stage is about 15–20% for vegetables and 10–15% for fruits. It is 5–10% for vegetables and fruits during the distribution stage, resulting in a large amount of resource waste and economic losses. At the same time, the global population affected by hunger has reached 828 million, exceeding one-tenth of the total global population. The improvement of the cold chain system will effectively reduce the amount of waste and loss of food during the storage and transportation stages. Firstly, this paper summarizes the concept and development status of traditional preservation technology; environmental parameter sensor components related to fruit and vegetable spoilage in the intelligent cold chain system; the data transmission and processing technology of the intelligent cold chain system, including wireless network communication technology (WI-FI) and cellular mobile communication; short-range communication technology, and the low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN). The smart cold chain system is regulated and optimized through the Internet of Things, blockchain, and digital twin technology to achieve the sustainable development of smart agriculture. The deep integration of artificial intelligence and traditional preservation technology provides new ideas and solutions for the problem of food waste in the world. However, the lack of general standards and the high cost of the intelligent cold chain system are obstacles to the development of the intelligent cold chain system. Governments and researchers at all levels should strive to highly integrate cold chain systems with artificial intelligence technology, establish relevant regulations and standards for cold chain technology, and actively promote development toward intelligence, standardization, and technology. Full article

Smart cities have been envisioned to provide smartness in managing internet of things (IoT) application domains, such as transport and mobility, health care, natural resources, electricity and energy, homes and buildings, commerce and retail, society and workplace, industry, agriculture, and the environment. The growth trajectory in usage of these IoT domains has led to a heterogeneous dense network in a smart city environment. The heterogeneous dense network in smart cities has led to challenges, such as difficulties in the management of LPWAN coexistence, interference, spectrum insufficiency, QoS, and scalability issues. The existing LPWAN technologies cannot support the heterogeneous dense network challenges in smart cities. Further, it cannot support diverse IoT, including medium- to high-bandwidth applications, due to the power, complexity, and resource constraints of the LPWAN devices. Hence, this paper addresses high data rate IoT applications and heterogeneous dense networks. This paper proposes a lightweight heterogenous multihomed network (LHM-N) model for diverse smart city applications that will address dense heterogeneity network challenges in a smart city. The work aims to advocate and integrate a manageable license-free LPWAN that will coexist with 5G private and public cellular networks in the LHM-N model. This will help to provide a cost-effective solution model in a heterogeneous dense smart city environment. Further, a secured lightweight energy-efficient packet-size forwarding engine (PSFE) algorithm is presented using the discrete event simulation (DES) methodological approach in MATLAB for complexity evaluation. In addition, a 5G reduced capability (RedCap) IoT device is integrated into the (LHM-N) model to support smart city. Finally, the results show that the LHM-N model outperforms the conventional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) protocol scheme in terms of error rate, latency, and data throughput with reduced energy costs for medium- to high-bandwidth industrial IoT applications. This validates the suitability of the LHM-N model for high data rate IoT applications. Full article

Fire alarm systems are typically equipped with various sensors such as heat, smoke, and gas detectors. These provide fire alerts and notifications of emergency exits when a fire has been detected. However, such systems do not give early warning in order to allow appropriate action to be taken when an alarm is first triggered, as the fire may have already caused severe damage. This paper analyzes a new dataset gathered from controlled realistic fire experiments conducted in an indoor laboratory environment. The experiments were conducted in a controlled manner by triggering the source of fire using electrical devices and charcoal on paperboard, cardboard or clothing. Important data such as humidity, temperature, MQ139, Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC) and eCO₂ were collected using sensor devices. These datasets will be extremely valuable to researchers in the machine learning and data science communities interested in pursuing novel advanced statistical and machine learning techniques and methods for developing early fire detection systems. The analysis of the collected data demonstrates the possibility of using eCO₂ and TVOC reading levels for early detection of smoldering fires. The experimental setup was based on Low-Power Wireless Area Networks (LPWAN), which can be used to reliably deliver fire-related data over long ranges without depending on the status of a cellular or WiFi Network. Full article

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) deployments have shown their potential for aiding the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Concerns regarding how the IoT can specifically drive SDGs 6, 11 and 9 in developing countries have been raised with respect to the challenges of deploying licensed and unlicensed low-power wide area network (LPWAN) IoT technologies and their opportunities for IoT consumers and service providers. With IoT infrastructure and protocols being ubiquitous and each being proposed for different SDGs, we review and compare the various performance characteristics of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT networks. From the performance analysis of our networks, NB-IoT, one of the standardised promising cellular IoT solutions for developing countries, is more expensive and less energy-efficient than LoRaWAN. Utilising the same user equipment (UE), NB-IoT consumed an excess of 2 mAh of power for joining the network and 1.7 mAh more for a 44-byte uplink message compared to LoRaWAN. However, NB-IoT has the advantage of reliably and securely delivering higher network connection capacity in IoT use cases, leveraging existing cellular infrastructure. With a maximum throughput of 264 bps at 837 ms measured latency, NB-IoT outperformed LoRaWAN and proved robust for machine-type communications. These findings will help IoT consumers and service providers understand the performance differences and deployment challenges of NB-IoT and LoRaWAN and establish new research directions to tackle IoT issues in developing countries. With Nigeria as a case study, for consumers and organisations at a crossroads in their long-term deployment decisions, the proposed LPWAN integrated architecture is an example of the deployment opportunities for consumer and industrial IoT applications in developing countries. Full article

Smart agriculture and wildlife monitoring are one of the recent trends of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which are evolving in providing sustainable solutions from producers. This article details the design, development and assessment of a wildlife monitoring application for IoT animal repelling devices that is able to cover large areas, thanks to the low power wide area networks (LPWAN), which bridge the gap between cellular technologies and short range wireless technologies. LoRa, the global de-facto LPWAN, continues to attract attention given its open specification and ready availability of off-the-shelf hardware, with claims of several kilometers of range in harsh challenging environments. At first, this article presents a survey of the LPWAN for smart agriculture applications. We proceed to evaluate the performance of LoRa transmission technology operating in the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, aimed at wildlife monitoring in a forest vegetation area. To characterize the communication link, we mainly use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Findings from this study show that achievable performance can greatly vary between the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, and prompt caution is required when taking numbers at face value, as this can have implications for IoT applications. In addition, our results show that the link reaches up to 860 m in the highly dense forest vegetation environment, while in the not so dense forest vegetation environment, it reaches up to 2050 m. Full article

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have the ability to localize a mobile transmitter using signals of opportunity, as a low power and low cost alternative to satellite-based solutions. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of three localization approaches based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS). More specifically, the performance of a proximity, range-based and optimized fingerprint-based algorithm is evaluated in a large-scale urban environment using a public Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) network. The results show a mean location estimation error of 340, 320 and 204 m, respectively. During the measurement campaign, we discovered a mobility issue in NB-IoT. In contrast to other LPWAN and cellular technologies which use multiple gateways or cells to locate a device, only a single cell antenna can be used for RSS-based localization in NB-IoT. Therefore, we address this limitation in the current NB-IoT hardware and software by studying the mobility of the cellular-based 3GPP standard in a localization context. Experimental results show that the lack of handover support leads to increased cell reselection time and poor cell sector reliability, which in turn results in reduced localization performance. Full article

In light of the difficulty of the inspection and maintenance of a transmission line condition monitoring system in remote mountainous areas, this paper proposes a long-term online monitoring scheme based on a low power wide area network (LPWAN). Considering different failure rates, three monitoring periods of transmission lines in mountainous areas are proposed. An online monitoring framework of transmission lines in mountainous areas was designed based on long range radio (LoRa) and a cellular mobile network, and a dynamic group network model of LoRa was established. The multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm can be used to optimize the energy and delay of the system, and then the suitable working mode for the three monitoring periods can be obtained. The simulation results showed that the minimum packet loss rate of the system could be less than 1%, the energy consumption of the system was 80% lower than the existing monitoring system, and the service life of the system can reach 15.13 years under the normal failure rate. Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed work shows the advantages of high reliability transmission, low cost and long-term monitoring, which is especially for transmission line monitoring in mountainous areas. Full article

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) is a promising solution for long range and low power Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine (M2M) communication applications. This paper focuses on defining a systematic and powerful approach of identifying the key characteristics of such applications, translating them into explicit requirements, and then deriving the associated design considerations. LPWANs are resource-constrained networks and are primarily characterized by long battery life operation, extended coverage, high capacity, and low device and deployment costs. These characteristics translate into a key set of requirements including M2M traffic management, massive capacity, energy efficiency, low power operations, extended coverage, security, and interworking. The set of corresponding design considerations is identified in terms of two categories, desired or expected ones and enhanced ones, which reflect the wide range of characteristics associated with LPWAN-based applications. Prominent design constructs include admission and user traffic management, interference management, energy saving modes of operation, lightweight media access control (MAC) protocols, accurate location identification, security coverage techniques, and flexible software re-configurability. Topological and architectural options for interconnecting LPWAN entities are discussed. The major proprietary and standards-based LPWAN technology solutions available in the marketplace are presented. These include Sigfox, LoRaWAN, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and long term evolution (LTE)-M, among others. The relevance of upcoming cellular 5G technology and its complementary relationship with LPWAN technology are also discussed. Full article

Wireless networks are now a part of the everyday life of many people and are used for many applications. Recently, new technologies that enable low-power and long-range communications have emerged. These technologies, in opposition to more traditional communication technologies rather defined as "short range", allow kilometer-wide wireless communications. Long-range technologies are used to form Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). Many LPWAN technologies are available, and they offer different performances, business models etc., answering different applications’ needs. This makes it hard to find the right tool for a specific use case. In this article, we present a survey about the long-range technologies available presently as well as the technical characteristics they offer. Then we propose a discussion about the energy consumption of each alternative and which one may be most adapted depending on the use case requirements and expectations, as well as guidelines to choose the best suited technology. Full article

In ubiquitous health-care monitoring (HCM), wireless body area networks (WBANs) are envisioned as appealing solutions that may offer reliable methods for real-time monitoring of patients’ health conditions by employing the emerging communication technologies. This paper therefore focuses more on the state-of-the-art wireless communication systems that can be explored in the next-generation WBAN solutions for HCM. Also, this study addressed the critical issues confronted by the existing WBANs that are employed in HCM. Examples of such issues include wide-range health data communication constraint, health data delivery reliability concern, and energy efficiency, which are attributed to the limitations of the legacy short range, medium range, and the cellular technologies that are typically employed in WBAN systems. Since the WBAN sensor devices are usually configured with a finite battery power, they often get drained during prolonged operations. This phenomenon is technically exacerbated by the fact that the legacy communication systems, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, and so on, consume more energy during data communications. This unfortunate situation offers a scope for employing suitable communication systems identified in this study to improve the productivity of WBANs in HCM. For this to be achieved, the emerging communication systems such as the low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are investigated in this study based on their power transmission, data transmission rate, data reliability in the context of efficient data delivery, communication coverage, and latency, including their advantages, as well as disadvantages. As a consequence, the LPWAN solutions are presented for WBAN systems in remote HCM. Furthermore, this research work also points out future directions for the realization of the next-generation of WBANs, as well as how to improve the identified communication systems, to further enhance their productivity in WBAN solutions for HCM. Full article

Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is a recent cellular radio access technology based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) introduced by Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). The main aim of NB-IoT is to support massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and enable low-power, low-cost, and low-data-rate communication. NB-IoT is based on LTE design with some changes to meet the mMTC requirements. For example, in the physical (PHY) layer only single-antenna and low-order modulations are supported, and in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layers only one physical resource block is allocated for resource scheduling. The aim of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview of the design changes brought in the NB-IoT standardization along with the detailed research developments from the perspectives of Physical and MAC layers. The survey also includes an overview of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) changes to support the Service Capability Exposure Function (SCEF) to manage both IP and non-IP data packets through Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP), the possible deployment scenarios of NB-IoT in future Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (HetNet). Finally, existing and emerging research challenges in this direction are presented to motivate future research activities. Full article