This work presents the efforts on optimizing energy consumption by deploying an energy management system using the current IoT component/system/platform integration trends through a layered architecture. LoBEMS (LoRa Building and Energy Management System), the proposed platform, was built with the mindset of proving a common platform that would integrate multiple vendor locked-in systems together with custom sensor devices, providing critical data in order to improve overall building efficiency. The actions that led to the energy savings were implemented with a ruleset that would control the already installed air conditioning and lighting control systems. This approach was validated in a kindergarten school during a three-year period, resulting in a publicly available dataset that is useful for future and related research. The sensors that feed environmental data to the custom energy management system are composed by a set of battery operated sensors tied to a System on Chip with a LoRa communication interface. These sensors acquire environmental data such as temperature, humidity, luminosity, air quality but also motion. An already existing energy monitoring solution was also integrated. This flexible approach can easily be deployed to any building facility, including buildings with existing solutions, without requiring any remote automation facilities. The platform includes data visualization templates that create an overall dashboard, allowing management to identify actions that lead to savings using a set of pre-defined actions or even a manual mode if desired. The integration of the multiple systems (air-conditioning, lighting and energy monitoring) is a key differentiator of the proposed solution, especially when the top energy consumers for modern buildings are cooling and heating systems. As an outcome, the evaluation of the proposed platform resulted in a 20% energy saving based on these combined energy saving actions.

The emergence of smartphones with Wireless LAN (WiFi) network interfaces brought new challenges to application developers. The expected increase of users connectivity will impact their expectations for example on the performance of background applications. Unfortunately, the number and breadth of the studies on the new patterns of user mobility and connectivity that result from the emergence of smartphones is still insufficient to support this claim. This paper contributes with preliminary results on a large scale study of the usage pattern of about 49000 devices and 31000 users who accessed at least one access point of the eduroam WiFi network on the campuses of the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute. Results confirm that the increasing number of smartphones resulted in significant changes to the pattern of use, with impact on the amount of traffic and users connection time.

The city of Lisbon, has any other capital of a European country, has a large number of issues while managing the waste and recycling containers spread throughout the city. This document presents the results of a study promoted by the Lisbon City Council for trialing LPWAN technology on the waste management vertical under the Lisbon Smart City initiative. Current waste management is done using GSM sensors, and the aim is to use LPWAN to reduce the costs, improve range and reduce provisioning times when changing the communications provider. After an initial study, LoRa was selected as the LPWAN of choice for the trials. The study is composed of multiple use cases at different distances, types of recycling waste containers, placements (underground and surface) and different kinds of waste level measurement LoRa sensors, deployed in order to assess the impact of the different use cases on the LoRa sensor usage. The results shown that the underground waste containers present the most difficult challenge, where the container itself imposes attenuation levels of 26dB on the link budget. The results promoted the deployment of a city wide LoRa network available to all departments inside the Lisbon City Council, and considering the network capacity the network, the network is also available to citizens to be used freely.

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