A considerable part of recent research in smart cities and IoT has focused on achieving energy savings in buildings and supporting aspects related to sustainability. In this context, the educational community is one of the most important ones to consider, since school buildings constitute a large part of non-residential buildings, while also educating students on sustainability matters is an investment for the future. In this work, we discuss a methodology for achieving energy savings in schools based on the utilization of data produced by an IoT infrastructure installed inside school buildings and related educational scenarios. We present the steps comprising this methodology in detail, along with a set of tangible results achieved within the GAIA project. We also showcase how an IoT infrastructure can support activities in an educational setting and produce concrete outcomes, with typical levels of 20% energy savings.

This work has been supported by the EU research project "European Extreme Performing Big Data Stacks" (E2Data), funded by the European Commission under H2020 and contract number 780245, and the "Green Awareness In Action" (GAIA) project, funded by the European Commission and the EASME under H2020 and contract number 696029. This document reflects only the authors' views and the EC and EASME are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Several networking technologies targeting the IoT application space currently compete within the smart city domain, both in outdoor and indoor deployments. However, up till now, there is no clear winner, and results from real-world deployments have only recently started to surface. In this paper, we present a comparative study of 2 popular IoT networking technologies, LoRa and IEEE 802.15.4, within the context of a research-oriented IoT deployment inside school buildings in Europe, targeting energy efficiency in education. We evaluate the actual performance of these two technologies in real-world settings, presenting a comparative study on the effect of parameters like the built environment, network quality, or data rate. Our results indicate that both technologies have their advantages, and while in certain cases both are perfectly adequate, in our use case LoRa exhibits a more robust behavior. Moreover, LoRa's characteristics make it a very good choice for indoor IoT deployments such as in educational buildings, and especially in cases where there are low bandwidth requirements. Keywords: IoT • LoRa • IEEE 802.15.4 • Educational buildings • Real-world deployment • LPWAN • Evaluation L. Pocero and S. Tsampas have contributed equally to this publication.