One oft-cited strategy towards sustainability is improving energy efficiency inside public buildings. In this context, the educational buildings sector presents a very interesting and important case for the monitoring and management of buildings, since it addresses both energy and educational issues. In this work, we present and discuss the hardware IoT infrastructure substrate that provides real-time monitoring in multiple school buildings. We believe that such a system needs to follow an open design approach: rely on hardware-agnostic components that communicate over well-defined open interfaces. We present in detail the design of our hardware components, while also providing insights to the overall system design and a first set of results on their operation. The presented hardware components are utilized as the core hardware devices for GAIA, an EU research project aimed at the educational community. As our system has been deployed and tested in several public school buildings in Greece, we also report on its validation

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage is key to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examines ways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizens’ behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system’s high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies and services in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer new app-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency of the building. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisioned here (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity.

Urban ecosystems are becoming one of the most potentially attractive scenarios for innovating new services and technologies. In parallel, city managers, urban utilities, and other stakeholders are fostering the intensive use of advanced technologies aiming at improving present city performance and sustainability. The deployment of such technology entails the generation of massive amounts of information which in many cases might become useful for other services and applications. Hence, aiming at taking advantage of such massive amounts of information and deployed technology as well as breaking down the potential digital barrier, some easy-to-use tools have to be made available to the urban stakeholders. These tools integrated in a platform, operated directly, or indirectly by the city, provide a singular opportunity for exploiting the concept of connected city whilst promoting innovation in all city dimensions and making the co-creation concept a reality, with an eventual impact on government policies.

Few IoT systems monitoring energy consumption in buildings have focused on the educational community. IoT in the educational domain can jump-start a process of sustainability awareness and behavioral change toward energy savings, as well as provide tangible financial savings. We present a real-world multisite IoT deployment, comprising 19 school buildings, aiming at enabling IoT-based energy awareness and sustainability lectures, promoting energy-saving behaviors supported by IoT data. We discuss scenarios where IoT-enabled applications are integrated into school life, providing an engaging and hands-on approach, based on real data, generating value in terms of educational and energy savings outcomes. We also present a set of first results, based on the analysis of school-building data, which highlight potential ways to identify irregularities and inefficiencies.

IoT deployments for smart cities and smart buildings have been multiplying exponentially in recent years, benefiting from a steady rise in the number of new technologies that deal with the underlying networking and application challenges in indoor and outdoor spaces. Due to the overlap in their specifications, we are still trying to figure out which of these technologies fits better to certain application domains, such as building monitoring. In this work, we provide a comparative study between IEEE 802.15.4 and LoRa, based on our experiences from using both wireless networking technologies in the context of indoor deployments aimed at IoT-enabled school buildings in Europe. We provide an apples-to-apples comparison between the two technologies, comparing them in some cases in the same building and application context. Although these two technologies initially might not seem to be competing in the same application space, in practice we found out that both have strengths and weaknesses in the specific application domain we have been using them. Moreover, our LoRa-based networking implementation, on top of Arduino-based hardware, appears to be an option that allows for a robust, reliable and lower overall cost IoT deployment, especially in cases with multi-floor building installations and low bandwidth requirements. We also present a network-level dataset produced from our installations and upon which we based our findings and discussion. We provide data collected from 6 different school buildings, 8 networks and 49 devices, to compare the performance and cost-effectiveness of competing IoT technologies. In that effect, with LoRa we can achieve similar or better link quality to IEEE 802.15.4, with higher data rate and lower costs.

In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore, a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets, and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications.