Extensible modular wireless sensor and actuator network and IoT platform with plug&amp;play module connection

Int J Wireless Inf Networks

Yasmin

et al. 2017

Self Cite

127

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.

Section: Power Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN Technology for Indoor Remote Health and Wellbeing Monitoring

Int J Wireless Inf Networks

Yasmin

et al. 2017

Self Cite

127

“…The tests were conducted using the modular Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN)/IoT platform developed at the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) of the University of Oulu ( [15], [16]). Specifically for these tests, three modules based on the RN2483 LoRaWAN transceivers 1 from Microchip were designed (the RN2483s were programmed with firmware v1.0) and built.…”

Section: A Experimental Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

On LoRaWAN scalability: Empirical evaluation of susceptibility to inter-network interference

2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC)

Janhunen

2017

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Abstract-Appearing on the stage quite recently, the Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are currently getting much of attention. In the current paper we study the susceptibility of one LPWAN technology, namely LoRaWAN, to the internetwork interferences. By means of excessive empirical measurements employing the certified commercial transceivers, we characterize the effect of modulation coding schemes (known for LoRaWAN as data rates (DRs)) of a transmitter and an interferer on probability of successful packet delivery while operating in EU 868 MHz band. We show that in reality the transmissions with different DRs in the same frequency channel can negatively affect each other and that the high DRs are influenced by interferences more severely than the low ones. Also, we show that the LoRa-modulated DRs are affected by the interferences much less than the FSK-modulated one. Importantly, the presented results provide insight into the network-level operation of the LoRa LPWAN technology in general, and its scalability potential in particular. The results can also be used as a reference for simulations and analyses or for defining the communication parameters for real-life applications.

“…Since comparison of the performance characteristics based only on the information obtained from the data sheets does not provide a comprehensive picture, we evaluated the practical performance of the core processor of our solution using the CoreMark [39] benchmark. For this, we adapted the code from the STM3220F evaluation board (Keil 1 The live demonstration was first presented at the IPSN 2015 conference [37] UVision toolchain) port [40] of the benchmark. The code was compiled with GCC compiler version 4.8.3 with the following flags: -O3.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of The Plug&Play Enabled Flexible Modular Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network Platform

Asian Journal of Control

2017

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In this paper we address the problem of increasing the flexibility of the contemporary wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) in regard to the design of the nodes. For this we propose the concept of a Plug&Play enabled modular WSAN node platform. According to our concept, the new WSAN nodes with desired functionalities can be built by stacking together the different hardware modules encapsulating power sources, processing units, wired and wireless transceivers, sensors and actuators, or even sets of these. Once a node is built, it automatically discovers and identifies all the connected hardware modules, obtains required software and tunes its own operation taking into account the node's structure, available resources and active applications. In this paper we first present the concept and then report the developed hardware and software architectures and the most critical mechanisms enabling implementation. Also we discuss the practical implementations and report the evaluation results for the prototyped solution. Our results show that the developed platform is much more feature and resource rich than the existing ones, which is achieved at a cost of increased consumption and size. We believe that the unique features of the proposed platform have the potential to drastically change the procedure of WSAN development, especially when it comes to experimenting and developing dynamic WSANs with a heterogeneous structure. In this respect the hardware identification and reconfiguration capabilities conceived in the platform can be utilized in full and may drastically increase the performance of WSANs, if combined with novel control and optimization schemes yet to be developed.