LPWAN systems are being deployed in lightly licensed regional bands. For applications with low data rate and low duty cycle, LPWAN extends battery life, reduces cost and offers improved link budgets compared with current cellular formats. Networks often use a star topology around a gateway node. LoRa is a Sub-GHz wireless technology designed for low power, unlicensed, Long Range operations. The communication performance of this technology was assessed. The results indicated that this technology can provide very robust communication even in the presence of high noise level.

Reducing or optimizing electrical power consumption is one of the most fundamental goals within the current frameworks of smart energy management. This approach would be spread from the industrial plants, characterized by high consumptions often well distributed throughout the day, down to the domestic utilities, typically discontinuous and with limited consumption at the single user level. More specifically, it is desirable for the latter case to be able to control in a simple and effective way the power consumption of typical household appliances by means of technologies that are already used and spread (such as tablets and smartphones) to become aware of their actual impact, both economic and environmental. To this aim, the authors present the proof-of-principle of user-friendly monitoring system for power consumption awareness based on the recent technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR). In particular, common devices such as smartphones associated along with appropriate measurement nodes and a suitable app, developed to the purpose, allow consumers to view in AR environment electrical consumption of their domestic electrical loads to consciously decide whether to switch them off. Performance of both sensor nodes and AR environment were preliminarily assessed in either laboratory experiments or actual household context, highlighting the promising effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The restrictions associated with the current SARS-Cov-2 pandemic are having a major impact on nearly all human activities and interactions; among these, the didactic and education field certainly has a prominent place. In the case of either complete lockdown or reduced accessibility to facilities and classrooms, the participation of students was severely limited for safety reasons. In particular, laboratory activities, already compromised by a large number of students of some classes, suffered from the restrictions, thus making it difficult to guarantee the possibility of live operating on instruments for the execution of measurements of different quantities of interest. To overcome the considered problem, this article proposes the use of enabling technologies of the Internet of Things and the fourth industrial revolution to allow students to achieve correct and complete training in laboratory activities. To this aim, remotely controlled instruments are used and displayed in augmented reality on consumer devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, or personal computers. The continuous availability of access to the instruments along with the realism in their representation and use ensures a positive and effective involvement of the students.

In this paper, a logic selectivity system based on Long Range (LoRa) technology for the protection of medium-voltage (MV) networks is proposed. The development of relays that communicate with each other using LoRa allows for the combination of the cost-effectiveness and ease of installation of wireless networks with long-range coverage and reliability. The realized demonstrator to assess the proposed system is also presented in the paper; based on different types of faults and different locations, the times needed for clearing a fault and restoring the network were estimated from repeated experiments. The obtained results confirm that, with an optimized design of transmitted packets and of protocol characteristics, LoRa communication grants fault management that meets the criteria of logic selectivity, with fault isolation occurring within the maximum allowed time.