Towards dense indoor environmental sensing with LoraWAN

Air pollution is the 4th most important factor of death globally and has a proven burden of disease while the link between covid-19 and poor air quality is proven beyond doubt. We expect sensors in buildings to grow in numbers to form Dense Indoor Sensor Networks (DISN) providing an unprecedent opportunity to analyse the performance, use and interaction with the building. However, off-the-self environmental sensors are rarely connected to a network; hence their potential to analyse the interaction with the building is not yet fully realised. This paper explores Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), as an alternative for creating environmental WSNs and DISNs, that extends beyond its original long-distance communication purpose. Our approach is based on a real-world deployment with one gateway, one cloud-based network server and 13 heterogeneous sensor nodes measuring CO2, VOCs, PM1.0, PM2.0, PM2.5, temperature and humidity, luminocity, barometric pressure, PIR, which we evaluated empirically for a week. Moreover, we attempt a comparison with the IEEE 802.11 network protocol, which we analyse in a second, co-located development. The obtained results confirm that although LoRaWAN is feasible for minimal viable setups more research is needed to prove the feasibility of LoRaWAN-based DISNs.

Eleftheria Katsiri, Christos Karasoulas, Christoforos Keroglou