The LoRaWAN technology, an example of Low Power Wide Area Network, is considered a possible IoT-derived solution for realizing private cellular (single-hop) communications in the industrial domain. However, despite LoRaWAN promises long range and dense environments with many obstacles (as the industrial ones), it may suffer from coverage issue. Additionally, the inverse relationship between data rates and range may be unacceptable for many industrial applications. In this paper, an innovative LoRaWAN range extender (based on an enhanced LoRaWAN node) is described, and its integration in the infrastructure of IIoT-enabled industrial wireless networks is presented. A frame relay strategy is suggested, thus avoiding to trade-off the highest data rates against an increased sensitivity. The feasibility of the solution is formally verified and the features of the realized proof-of-concept prototype, based on commercially available hardware, are discussed. The experimental results, obtained with a purposely designed test bench, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In particular, the range extender is transparent for legacy LoRaWAN networks as confirmed by correct relaying of uplink and downlink for different types of LoRaWAN message.

This work deals with the management of sporadic and rare events linked with emergency situations in wireless IoT scenarios. The goal is to increase the performance of the emergency communication, when Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are used as IoT backbone. In the proposed approach a device usually operates as a normal node but, in case of emergency, can use the novel LoRa-REP access method. In this work the LoRa-REP, based on message replication, is discussed focusing on its capability of reducing average transaction time and increasing success probability. Two operational paradigms have been considered and tested: public LoRaWAN infrastructure with cloud-based backend, and private LoRaWAN networks with local backend (Edge/Fog computing). Typical examples of public networks are smart cities, whereas local networks are often used in industry or building automation. Additionally, two real use cases (for public and local scenarios) are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results (with a prototype device implementing LoRa-REP and named eNode) show that the success probability of the emergency communication can be increased up to 99.5%, and the average transaction time can be reduced up to 15% with respect to LoRaWAN without retries or up to 50% with respect to LoRaWAN with retries.

Many different application domains are taking advantage from the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Among them, intelligent transportation systems can improve efficiency and sustainability by exploiting increased awareness about the actual mobility resource availability. For this reason, the idea of mobility as a service is gaining consensus. However, satisfying the requirements of very heterogeneous scenarios can be really challenging. In this work, we propose adding redundancy and diversity to the IoT platforms to improve overall resilience and flexibility, other than mitigating unstable behaviors. A proof-of-concept prototype is realized around a commercial IoT platform natively intended for the automotive domain. New “paths” from the vehicles to the end users, different from the original one, are added for retrieving the information: one additional LoRaWAN trunk and the other two via IBM Cloud service. A methodology for performance evaluation is suggested, computing purposely defined metrics. When applied to a sample use case, experimental results show that the redundancy and diversity strategies, compared to the (best) single-path approach, halve the overall average transfer delay (from about 1.2 s down to about 0.5 s) and the standard deviation (from about 0.5 to about 0.3 s).

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is introducing the IoT approach in the industrial automation world, paving the way to innovative services for improving efficiency, reliability and availability of industrial processes and products. The IIoT takes advantage of the collection of large amount of data by means of (wireless) links connecting smart sensors attached to the system of interest. Low Power Wide Area Networks emerged as a viable solution for implementing private cellular like communications. In this paper, the LoRaWAN technology is addressed, thanks to the wide acceptance it received in both industrial and academic worlds. In particular, an enhanced node is proposed as a building block of IIoT-enabled industrial wireless networks. It offers new features: it behaves as a regular node; it can act as a gateway toward legacy/different (wired) networks; and it can extend LoRaWAN coverage acting as a range extender (i.e. a single hop forwarder). After a brief overview of LoRa and LoRaWAN, the paper deals with the features of the realized node, exploiting commercially available hardware. The experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach. In particular, the range extender capability of transmitting replicas of an incoming messages is tested for different transmission delays.