Monitoring environment parameters using IoT and long range data communications, application to smart cities

Nghiên cứu khoa học công nghệ<br /> <br /> MONITORING ENVIRONMENT PARAMETERS<br /> USING IoT AND LONG-RANGE DATA COMMUNICATIONS,<br /> APPLICATION TO SMART CITIES<br /> Ha Duyen Trung1*, Nguyen Huu Trung1, Thai Trung Kien2, Doan Thanh Binh3<br /> Abstract: Currently, WiFi, 3G/4G mobile communications are very popular and<br /> available in almost every place. Many Internet of Things (IoT) applications based on<br /> WiFi and 3G/4G technology modules have been developed and applied directly to<br /> social life. However, for applications with WiFi also take some limitations such as<br /> short distance transmission and large power consumption. This will be limited to<br /> many applications that do not require large bandwidth but need more practical works<br /> for long data transmission distances. Therefore, to overcome these drawbacks, in this<br /> paper, we propose the environmental parameters monitoring system in terms of<br /> temperature, humidity, CO concentration, PM2.5, illumination, etc., based on LoRa<br /> technologies and IoT. The designed system takes advantages of transmission<br /> operation with a maximum distance of up to 15 km and extremely low power<br /> consumption. Using the advantages LoRa module will be the perfect choice for the<br /> IoT applications to everyone, in places where Wi-Fi and 3G/4G is not available. Not<br /> only in remote rural areas but also in city applications such as smart street lighting,<br /> parking lots or applications monitoring environmental conditions in industrial/high-<br /> park zones. With the development of industrial revolution 4.0 and IoT applications,<br /> LoRa technologies will be one of the common technologies for the near future.<br /> Key words: IoT; LoRa; Environment monitoring; Smart City.<br /> <br /> 1. INTRODUCTION<br /> Environmental monitoring and management is becoming more important, as cities<br /> grow fast and often uncontrollably. The population of urban residents is estimated to<br /> increase 85 per cent by 2050. This convergence of people brings new challenges for<br /> city planners, such as the need to improve air and water quality, and control noise<br /> pollution to create a healthy and enjoyable environment for Smart Cities [1].<br /> The Internet of Things (IoT) is network of objects (things) in everyday life,<br /> which are embedded with microcontroller, sensors/actuators and its software. In<br /> IoT, it is essential that these things can widely collect, communicate data with their<br /> surroundings and the users with low power consumption. The IoT is implemented<br /> for the development of applications that makes use of the enormous amount and<br /> the data generated by such objects. This method finds applications by enabling<br /> easy access and communication with a wide-range of devices such as home<br /> automation, e-Health, environment and many others.<br /> In this scenario, the application of the IoT paradigm to such a Smart City<br /> environment monitoring is of particular interest, as it responds to the governments to<br /> adopt information and communications technologies (ICT) solutions in the<br /> management of public affairs [2]. Though there is no yet formal and widely<br /> accepted definition of - Smart City, the aim is to make a better use of the municipal<br /> resources, increasing the quality of the services presented to the residents, while<br /> decreasing the operational costs of the municipal administrations. This objective can<br /> <br /> <br /> Tạp chí Nghiên cứu KH&CN quân sự, Số Đặc san CNTT, 04 - 2019 65<br />  Công nghệ thông tin<br /> <br /> be tailed by the deployment of an IoT, i.e., a communication infrastructure that<br /> provides cohensive, simple, and inexpensive access to overabundance of public<br /> services, thus unleashing potential interactions and increasing clearness to the<br /> citizens. IoT has numerous benefits in managing and optimizing traditional services,<br /> such as transport and parking, lighting, observation and maintenance of public areas,<br /> protection of cultural heritage, garbage collection, hospitals, and school.<br /> Furthermore, the accessibility of different types of data, which is collected by a<br /> persistent IoT, may also be used to take advantage to increase the clearness and<br /> promote the actions of the local government toward the residents, improve the<br /> awareness of people about the status of their town, stimulate the active participation<br /> of the residents in the management of public administration, and also stimulate the<br /> building of new services provided by the IoT [3]. Therefore, the presentation of the<br /> IoT standard to the City is particularly to regional and regional administrations that<br /> may become the early implementation of such technologies, thus acting as catalyzes<br /> for the implementation of the IoT paradigm on a wider scale.<br /> IoT uses cases are characterized by requirements such as data rate, coverage,<br /> device complexity, latency, and battery lifetime. These are thus important<br /> performance metrics. Furthermore, according to [4], IoT traffic is forecast to have<br /> compounded annual growth rate of 23 percent between 2015 and 2023. It is<br /> therefore important to ensure that 3G/NB-IoT has good capacity to support such<br /> growth in the years to come.<br /> The rest of paper is organized as follows: a monitoring proposed system,<br /> especially from the perspective of environment is first given in Section II. We then<br /> present the results and discussion details of the IoT implementation for<br /> environmental monitoring in Section III. The summary is concluded in section IV.<br /> 2. PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE<br /> 3G/NB-IoT Sensor #1<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Computer Laptop<br /> LoRa<br /> <br /> WiFi, 3G, 4G<br /> Sensor #2<br /> Ethernet<br /> IoT cloud server<br /> LoRa<br /> LoRa gateway<br /> <br /> <br /> WiFi, 3G, 4G<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Smart phone Sensor #N<br /> <br /> <br /> Figure 1. A diagram of LoRa/3G and IoT networks-based environmental<br /> monitoring systems.<br /> A diagram of LoRa/3G/NB-IoT and IoT networks-based environmental<br /> monitoring systems is illustrated in the Fig. 1. LoRa is one of the prominent<br /> cadidates for Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) [4], providing wide<br /> communication coverage with low power comsumption, at the expense of data<br /> <br /> <br /> 66 H. D. Trung, …, D. T. Binh, “Monitoring environment parameters … to smart cities.”<br /> Nghiên cứu khoa học công nghệ<br /> <br /> rate, supporting a multitude of IoT use-cases through a digital wireless<br /> communication technology. LoRa enables a long communication distance as a<br /> LoRa receiver can decode transmissions at 19.5 dB below the noise floor.<br /> Operating in license-free ISM bands, LoRa provides several physical layer<br /> parameters that can be customized and developed. These parameters include:<br /> spreading factor (SF), Bandwidth (BW), transmission power (TP), and code rate<br /> (CR). The LoRa PHY layer uses a chirp spread-spectrum (CSS) modulation where<br /> different SFs tune the chirp modulation rates. Lower SFs such as SF7 allow for<br /> higher data rates but reduced transmission range, whereas higher SFs such as SF12<br /> provide longer trangmission range at lower data rates. Currently, LoRa technology<br /> is used for monitoring purposes in Europe and America, it however has not been<br /> applied for such applications in Vietnam. In the study, we use of LoRa/3G and IoT<br /> infrastructure for monitoring the air quality environment in terms of temperature,<br /> humidity, CO concentration.<br /> CRC<br /> Preamble Header Payload<br /> (Optional)<br /> <br /> CR=4/8 CR=4/(4+N)<br /> <br /> Figure 2. The structure of a LoRa message frame.<br /> Fig. 2 shows the LoRa physical message frame. It starts with a preamble, whose<br /> duration can be configured between 10.25 and 65,539.25 symbols. An optional<br /> header follows that is always transmitted with a CR of 4/8. The header contains the<br /> following information: payload length in bytes. CR is used for payload, and<br /> whether a CRC is present. The length of the payload size is stored in 1 byte; hence<br /> the maximum payload is 255 bytes. The header field is optional; it is more energy-<br /> efficient to disable the header in situations where payload length, CR, and CRC<br /> presence are known in advance. The frame ends with an optional 16-bit CRC field.<br /> Payload and CRC are transmitted with a CR of 4/(4+N), where N=1,2,3,4. A more<br /> detailed discussion of LoRa digital wireless communication can be found in [5].<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> (a) (b)<br /> Figure 3. Hardware implementation of smart sensors (a) and packed node (b).<br /> Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced<br /> in 3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for IoT. NB-IoT addresses<br /> key IoT requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity, long<br /> battery lifetime, support of massive numbers of devices in a cell, and significant<br /> coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. We also share the various<br /> design rationales during the standardization of NB-IoT in Release 13.<br /> <br /> <br /> Tạp chí Nghiên cứu KH&CN quân sự, Số Đặc san CNTT, 04 - 2019 67<br />  Công ngh<br /> nghệệ thông tin<br /> <br /> MQTT was released by IBM and targets lightweight M2M communications. It<br /> is an asynchronous publish/subscribe protocol that runs on top of the TCP stack<br /> [7]. Publish/subscribe protocols meet better the M2M communication requirements<br /> than request/response since clients do not have to request updates thus, the network<br /> bandwidth is decreasing and the need for using computational resources is<br /> dropping. In MQTT there is a broker (server) [8] that contains topics. Each client<br /> can<br /> an be a publisher that sends information to the broker at a specific topic or/and a<br /> subscriber that receives automatic messages every time there is a new update in a<br /> topic which is subscribed.<br /> 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Figure 4. Displaying environmenta<br /> environmentall parameters using IoT and LoRa network<br /> network.<br /> <br /> <br /> 68 H. D. Trung, …, D. T. Binh<br /> Binh,, ““Monitoring cities.””<br /> Monitoring environment parameters … to smart cities<br /> Nghiên cứu khoa học công nghệ<br /> <br /> The designed sensors for monitoring environmental parameters using IoT and<br /> LoRa network is shown in the Fig. 3. In the experiments, the distance between<br /> the monitoring node that the LoRa IoT gateway is 500 m. Other parameters<br /> conditions such as CR = 4/5, BW = 125 kHz, SF = 7, Tp = 17 dBm. Each node<br /> sends 100 monitoring data packets to the server. Then, the other parameters are<br /> fixed and change only SF = 9 and SF = 12. We observe the monitoring<br /> parameters’ results presented in Fig. 4, including: Temperature, humanity, CO,<br /> PM2.5, smog, light illumination.<br /> We observed that, by using the IoT and LoRa data communication, the longer<br /> the transmission distances, the lower the packet loss rate. This is because the<br /> gateway only processes data from one node at a time, there is a loss of packet due<br /> to two nodes transmitting at the same time, which node is forwarded to the node<br /> that will be received. However, because there are only two nodes and the<br /> processing time of information from one node is very fast, the loss of packets is<br /> very rare. It can be also seen that the higher the spread, the greater the distance, but<br /> the obstacle is very important, because the area has many trees and houses, so the<br /> distance measurement should not be far.<br /> 4. CONCLUSION<br /> In this paper, the environmental sensor monitoring system for smart cities is<br /> designed and tested based on IoT and Long-Range infrastructure. An accurate and<br /> stable monitoring system is implemented with low power consumption, long-range<br /> data transmission distances. The system also employed multiple monitoring nodes<br /> to collect multiple environmental surveillance areas. By using such system,<br /> extremely tests are expandable and with various sensors, not just CO, temperature<br /> and humidity (e.g., brightness sensor, distance sensor, water sensors).<br /> Acknowledgement: The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science and<br /> Technology has supported under the KC.01/16-20 program.<br /> REFERENCES<br /> [1]. P. Bellavista, G. Cardone, A. Corradi, and L. Foschini, "Convergence of<br /> MANET and WSN in IoT urban scenarios," IEEE Sens. J. 13 (2013) 3558–<br /> 3567.<br /> [2]. H. Schaffers, N. Komninos, M. Pallot, B. Trousse, M. Nilsson, and A.<br /> Oliveira, "Smart cities and the future internet: Towards cooperation<br /> frameworks for open innovation," The Future Internet, Lect. Notes Comput.<br /> Sci. 6656 (2011) 431– 446.<br /> [3]. D. Cuff, M. Hansen, and J. Kang, "Urban sensing: Out of the<br /> woods,"Commun. ACM. 51 (2008) 24-33.<br /> [4]. “Ericsson Mobility Report, on the Pulse of the Networked Society,” Ericsson<br /> White Paper, June 2016; https://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2016/er<br /> [5]. N. Sornin, M. Luis, T. Eirich, T. Kramp, and O. Hersent, “LoRaWAN<br /> Specifications," LoRa Alliance, San Ramon, CA, USA,” 2015.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Tạp chí Nghiên cứu KH&CN quân sự, Số Đặc san CNTT, 04 - 2019 69<br />  Công nghệ thông tin<br /> <br /> [6]. Augustin, J. Yi, T. Clausen, and W. M. Townsley, “A Study of LoRa: Long<br /> Range and Low Power Networks for the Internet of Things,” Sensors. 16<br /> (2016).<br /> [7]. Qualcomm, Inc., “Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT),” RP-151621, 3GPP TSG RAN<br /> Meeting #69, Sept. 2015.<br /> [8]. Banks, A. and Gupta, R, “MQTT version 3.1.1,” OASIS Standard, 2014.<br /> [9]. N. De Caro, W. Colitti, K. Steenhaut, G. Mangino, and G. Reali, "Comparison<br /> of two lightweight protocols for smartphone-based sensing," in 2013 IEEE<br /> 20th Symposium on Communications and Vehicular Technology in the<br /> Benelux (SCVT). (2013) 1–6.<br /> TÓM TẮT<br /> GIÁM SÁT THÔNG SỐ MÔI TRƯỜNG SỬ DỤNG INTERNET<br /> KẾT NỐI VẠN VẬT VÀ TRUYỀN DỮ LIỆU TẦM XA,<br /> ỨNG DỤNG CHO THÀNH PHỐ THÔNG MINH<br /> Hiện nay, các chuẩn WiFi, 3G/4G rất phổ biến và có sẵn ở hầu hết mọi nơi.<br /> Nhiều ứng dụng Internet of Things (IoT) dựa trên các mô-đun WiFi và 3G/4G đã<br /> được phát triển và áp dụng trực tiếp vào đời sống xã hội. Tuy nhiên, đối với các ứng<br /> dụng WiFi có một số hạn chế như truyền khoảng cách truyền dẫn ngắn và tiêu thụ<br /> năng lượng lớn. Điều này sẽ được giới hạn ở nhiều ứng dụng không yêu cầu băng<br /> thông lớn nhưng cần có khoảng cách truyền dữ liệu dài. Do đó, để khắc phục những<br /> nhược điểm này, trong bài báo này, chúng tôi phát triển hệ thống giám sát các thông<br /> số môi trường về nhiệt độ, độ ẩm, nồng độ CO, PM2.5, chiếu sáng, v.v., dựa trên<br /> công nghệ LoRa và IoT. Hệ thống được thiết kế tận dụng lợi thế của hoạt động<br /> truyền dẫn với khoảng cách tối đa lên tới 15 km và mức tiêu thụ điện năng cực thấp.<br /> Sử dụng các ưu điểm của mô-đun LoRa sẽ là lựa chọn hoàn hảo cho các ứng dụng<br /> IoT ở những nơi không có Wi-Fi và 3G/4G. Không chỉ ở các vùng nông thôn hẻo<br /> lánh mà cả trong các ứng dụng ở thành phố như đèn đường thông minh, bãi đỗ xe<br /> hoặc các ứng dụng giám sát các điều kiện môi trường trong khu công nghiệp / công<br /> viên cao. Với sự phát triển của cuộc cách mạng công nghiệp 4.0 và ứng dụng IoT,<br /> công nghệ LoRa sẽ là một trong những công nghệ phổ biến cho tương lai gần.<br /> Từ khóa: IoT; LoRa; Giám sát môi trường; Thành phố thông minh.<br /> <br /> Nhận bài ngày 29 tháng 12 năm 2018<br /> Hoàn thiện ngày 12 tháng 3 năm 2019<br /> Chấp nhận đăng ngày 25 tháng 3 năm 2019<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Địa chỉ: 1Đại học Bách Khoa Hà Nội;<br /> 2<br /> Viện KHKTQS;<br /> 3<br /> Đại học Điện Lực.<br /> *<br /> Email: trung.haduyen@hust.edu.vn.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 70 H. D. Trung, …, D. T. Binh, “Monitoring environment parameters … to smart cities.”<br />