Abstract. Long lifetime of a wireless sensor/actuator node, low transceiver chip cost and large coverage area are the main characteristics of the low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies. These targets correlate well with the requirements imposed by the health and wellbeing applications of the digital age. Therefore, LPWANs can found their niche among traditional short range technologies for wireless body area networks, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth and ultra wideband. To check this hypothesis, in this work we investigate the indoor performance with one of the LPWAN technologies, named LoRa, by the means of empirical measurements. The measurements were conducted using the commercially available devices in the main campus of the University of Oulu, Finland. In order to obtain the comprehensive picture, the experiments were executed for the sensor nodes operating with various physical layer settings, i.e., using the different spreading factors, bandwidths and transmit powers. The obtained results indicate that with the largest spreading factor of 12 and 14 dBm transmit power, the whole campus area (570 meters North to South and over 320 meters East to West) can be covered by a single base station. The average measured packet success delivery ratio for this case was 96.7%, even with no acknowledgements and retransmissions used. The campus was covered also with lower spreading factors with 2 dBm transmit power, but considerably more packets were lost. For example with spreading factor 8, 13.1% of the transmitted packets were lost. Aside of this, we have investigated the power consumption of the LoRa compliant transceiver with different physical layer settings. The experiments conducted using the specially designed module show that based on the settings used, the amount of energy for sending the same amount of data may differ up to 200-fold. This calls for efficient selection of the communication mode to be used by the energy restricted devices and emphasizes the importance of enabling adaptive data rate control.

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. Index Terms-5GTN, LoRaWAN, MultiConnect Conduit, PPP, MQTT, ThingWorx.

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.

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.

Advances in technology and data analysis provide rich opportunities for developing intelligent environments assisting their inhabitants, so-called smart environments or smart spaces. Enhanced with technology, sensors, user interfaces, and various applications, such smart spaces are capable of recognizing users and situations they are in, react accordingly, e.g., by providing certain services or changes to the environment itself. Therefore, smart space solutions are gradually coming to different application domains, each with corresponding specific characteristics. In this article, we discuss our experiences and explore the challenges of a long-term real-world Internet of Things (IoT) deployment at a University campus. We demonstrate the technical implementation and data quality issues. We conduct several studies, from data analysis to interaction with space, utilizing the developed infrastructure, and we also share our actions to open the data for education purposes and discuss their outcomes. With this article, we aim to share our experience and provide real-world lessons learned when building an open, multipurpose, publicly used smart space at a University campus.