C57etukansi.

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OULU 2018

C 657
C 657
UNIVERSITY OF OUL U P.O. Box 8000 FI-90014 UNIVERSITY OF OULU FINLA ND

ACTA UN
U NIIVVEERRSSIITTAT
ATIISS O
OUULLU
UEEN
NSSIISS

ACTA
A C TA U N I V E R S I TAT I S O U L U E N S I S

Juha Petäjäjärvi
C
TECHNICA
TECHNICA

LOW-POWER WIRELESS

Juha Petäjäjärvi
University Lecturer Tuomo Glumoff

University Lecturer Santeri Palviainen COMMUNICATIONS IN

Postdoctoral research fellow Sanna Taskila
THE INTERNET OF THINGS
– SOLUTIONS AND
Professor Olli Vuolteenaho
EVALUATIONS
University Lecturer Veli-Matti Ulvinen

Planning Director Pertti Tikkanen

Professor Jari Juga

University Lecturer Anu Soikkeli

Professor Olli Vuolteenaho

UNIVERSITY OF OULU GRADUATE SCHOOL;
UNIVERSITY OF OULU,
FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING;
Publications Editor Kirsti Nurkkala CENTRE FOR WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

ISBN 978-952-62-1918-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-952-62-1919-6 (PDF)
ISSN 0355-3213 (Print)
ISSN 1796-2226 (Online)
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS OULUENSIS
C Te c h n i c a 6 5 7

JUHA PETÄJÄJÄRVI

LOW-POWER WIRELESS
COMMUNICATIONS IN
THE INTERNET OF THINGS –
SOLUTIONS AND EVALUATIONS

Academic dissertation to be presented with the assent of

the Doctoral Training Committee of Technology and
Natural Sciences of the University of Oulu for public
defence in the OP auditorium (L10), Linnanmaa, on 8 June
2018, at 12 noon

U N I VE R S I T Y O F O U L U , O U L U 2 0 1 8
Copyright © 2018
Acta Univ. Oul. C 657, 2018

Supervised by
Professor Jari Iinatti
Professor Aarno Pärssinen

Reviewed by
Professor Emil Jovanov
Professor Mads Lauridsen

Opponent
Professor D. K. Arvind

ISBN 978-952-62-1918-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-952-62-1919-6 (PDF)

ISSN 0355-3213 (Printed)

ISSN 1796-2226 (Online)

Cover Design
Raimo Ahonen

JUVENES PRINT
TAMPERE 2018
Petäjäjärvi, Juha, Low-power wireless communications in the Internet of Things –
solutions and evaluations.
University of Oulu Graduate School; University of Oulu, Faculty of Information Technology
and Electrical Engineering; Centre for Wireless Communications
Acta Univ. Oul. C 657, 2018
University of Oulu, P.O. Box 8000, FI-90014 University of Oulu, Finland

Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is already providing solutions to various tasks related to monitoring
the environment and controlling devices over wired and wireless networks. It is estimated by
several well-known research facilities that the number of IoT devices will be in the order of tens
of billions by 2020. This inevitably brings challenges and costs in deployment, management, and
maintenance of networks. The focus of this thesis is to provide solutions that mainly help in the
deployment and maintenance of various wireless IoT networks.
Different applications have different requirements for a wireless link coverage. It is important
to utilize suitable radio technology for a particular application in order, e.g., to maximize the
lifetime of a device. A wireless body area network (WBAN) typically consists of devices that are
within couple of meters from each other. The WBAN is suitable for, e.g., measuring muscle
activity and transferring data to a storage for processing. The wireless link can use air as a medium,
or alternatively, an induced electric field to a body can be used. In this thesis, it is shown that a
location of the electrodes in the body have impact to the attenuation.
Home automation IoT applications are typically implemented with mid-range wireless
technologies, known as wireless personal area networks (WPAN). In order to minimize and get
rid of battery change operations, a wake-up receiver could be utilized in order to improve the
device’s energy efficiency. The concept is introduced and performance of the current state-of-the-
art works are presented. In addition, a control loop enabling a passive device to have control over
an energy source is proposed. Applications that have low bandwidth requirements can be
implemented with low-power wide area networks (LPWAN). One technology – LoRaWAN – is
evaluated, and it is recommended as based on the results to use it in non-critical applications.

Keywords: Bluetooth Low Energy, energy harvesting, IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.15.6,
LoRaWAN, low-power wide area network, mobility, wake-up receiver, wireless body
area network, wireless personal area network
Petäjäjärvi, Juha, Matalan tehonkulutuksen langaton viestintä esineiden
internetissä – ratkaisuja ja arviointeja.
Oulun yliopiston tutkijakoulu; Oulun yliopisto, Tieto- ja sähkötekniikan tiedekunta; Centre for
Wireless Communications
Acta Univ. Oul. C 657, 2018
Oulun yliopisto, PL 8000, 90014 Oulun yliopisto

Tiivistelmä
Esineiden internet (Internet of Things, IoT) mahdollistaa jo laajan kirjon erilaisia ratkaisuja
ympäristön monitorointiin ja laitteiden hallintaan hyödyntäen sekä langattomia että langallisia
verkkoja. Usea hyvin tunnettu tutkimusorganisaatio on arvioinut, että vuonna 2020 IoT laittei-
den määrä tulee olemaan kymmenissä miljardeissa. Se luo väistämättä haasteita laitteiden sijoit-
tamisessa, hallinnassa ja kunnossapidossa. Tämä väitöskirja keskittyy tarjoamaan ratkaisuja, jot-
ka voivat helpottaa langattomien IoT laitteiden sijoittamisessa ja kunnossapidossa.
IoT sovellusten laaja kirjo vaatii erilaisia langattomia radioteknologioita, jotta sovellukset
voitaisiin toteuttaa, muun muassa, mahdollisimman energiatehokkaasti. Langattomassa kehover-
kossa (wireless body area network, WBAN) käytetään usein hyvin lyhyitä langattomia linkkejä.
WBAN on soveltuva esimerkiksi lihasten aktiivisuus mittauksessa ja mittaustiedon siirtämises-
sä talteen varastointia ja prosessointia varten. Linkki voidaan toteuttaa käyttäen ilmaa rajapinta-
na, tai vaihtoehtoisesti, kehoa. Tässä työssä on näytetty, että käytettäessä kehoa siirtotienä, elekt-
rodien sijainnilla on merkitystä signaalin vaimennuksen kannalta.
Kotiautomaatio IoT sovellukset ovat tyypillisesti toteutettu käyttäen langatonta likiverkkoa,
jossa linkin pituus sisätiloissa on alle 30 metriä. Jotta päästäisiin eroon pariston vaihto-operaati-
osta tai ainakin vähennettyä niiden määrää, herätevastaanotinta käyttämällä olisi mahdollista
parantaa laitteiden energiatehokkuutta. Herätevastaanotin konsepti ja tämänhetkistä huipputasoa
edustavien vastaanottimien suorituskyky ovat esitetty. Lisäksi, on ehdotettu menetelmä joka
takaa energian saannin passiiviselle IoT laitteelle. IoT sovellukset jotka tyytyvät vähäiseen kais-
tanleveyteen voidaan toteuttaa matalatehoisella laajan alueen verkolla (low-power wide area net-
work, LPWAN). Yhden LPWAN teknologian, nimeltään LoRaWAN, suorituskykyä on evaluoi-
tu. Tulosten perusteella suositus on hyödyntää kyseistä teknologiaa ei-kriittisissä sovelluksissa.

Asiasanat: Bluetooth Low Energy, energian louhinta, herätevastaanotin, IEEE 802.15.4,

IEEE 802.15.6, langaton kehoverkko, langaton likiverkko, liikkuvuus, LoRaWAN,
matalatehoinen laajan alueen verkko
To my family
8
Preface
The research work for this doctoral thesis has been carried out in several research
projects at the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), Faculty of Information
Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), University of Oulu, Finland. The
work has been funded mainly by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation
(Tekes), European Union (EU), Ministry of Defense, industry, and the CWC via
the research projects. The research projects have been SENSEI, an EU project;
WAS and PROTECTOR, both of which were Tekes projects; and these were
followed by the Wireless Networking Lab (WNL) project funded by the CWC and
ITEE. The Scientific Advisory Board for Defense (Maanpuolustuksen tieteellinen
neuvottelukunta, MATINE) funded the work via the Suitability of energy efficient
human body communication link for human body measurements –project. The
project included a research visit to Yokohama National University, Japan, funded
by the CoNHealth project. The last research project that funded the work was the
Virtual service environment C –project. In the last two projects, I served as a project
manager. Furthermore, this thesis has been financially supported by Academy of
Finland 6Genesis Flagship (grant 318927).
I have received personal grants from the following Finnish foundations over
the years: Seppo Säynäjäkangas Science Foundation, Riitta and Jorma J. Takanen
Foundation, Tauno Tönning Foundation, and Ahti Pekkala Foundation. I am very
grateful for this support and highly appreciate it.
I also want to express my warmest gratitude to my main supervisor, Prof. Jari
Iinatti, for invaluable guidance throughout my doctoral studies and actually
believing that this doctoral thesis will see the light of day. The discussions
especially during the crossroads between projects helped me greatly to continue my
journey towards my doctoral degree. I am also most grateful to my second
supervisor, Prof. Aarno Pärssinen, for the eye-opening discussions related to low-
power receivers. Without these discussions, I might still be wandering between
wrong and catastrophic research paths.
Docent Matti Hämäläinen deserves gratitude for pushing me towards doctoral
studies. Prior to doctoral studies, he offered me a research assistant position to do
my Master thesis. After graduating, Matti encouraged me to apply for a doctoral
student position. Matti has also helped me greatly in the research work. We have
co-authored several publications, and some of them are part of this work.
I have been very fortunate to do research alongside so many talented
telecommunications specialists. Particularly, Konstantin Mikhaylov, Dr. Heikki

9
Karvonen, and Lic. Tech. Risto Vuohtoniemi, have played highly important roles
by always being willing to discuss, sharing their knowledge, and provide assistance
with a wide range of issues related to wireless communications and research in
general. For that, I am highly grateful. I am also thankful to numerous other talented
researchers at the CWC who have given substantially of their time as project
managers or coworkers. My project managers have been Dr. Jussi Haapola, Harri
Viittala, Martti Huttunen, Dr. Timo Bräysy, Tuomo Hänninen, Dr. Harri Posti, and
Prof. Ari Pouttu, and my coworkers have been Ikram Ashraf, Dr. Leonardo Goratti,
Marko Härkönen, Jani Saloranta, Hasnain Virk, Anton Paatelma, Marko
Mäkeläinen, Rumana Yasmin, Abdul Moiz, and Jarkko Kaleva.
I want to thank both my follow-up group chair, Prof. Timo Rahkonen, and
member Dr. Markus Berg for their helpful comments related to my doctoral training
plan and providing much appreciated encouragement for the final steps towards my
doctoral degree. In the last follow-up group meeting, we agreed that Profs. Emil
Jovanov and Mads Lauridsen are well-suited candidates to act as pre-examiners.
The decision turned out to be successful, since Profs. Jovanov and Lauridsen
provided critical and valuable comments that helped me greatly to improve the
work, and I am very appreciative for this.
CWC administrative personnel have been doing top-notch work on an
everyday basis, which has helped towards focusing on the research. Many thanks
to Kirsi Ojutkangas, Hanna Saarela, Mari Lehmikangas, Eija Pajunen, Renata Sebö,
Elina Komminaho, Sari Luukkonen, Heli Lindén, and Timo Äikäs. A special thank
you to Jari Sillanpää, who has helped me in various networking and computer
related problems so many times that I have lost track. Without Jari’s help, some of
the network setups needed for research might have been dropped or implemented
in some time-consuming and not so handy manner.
I wish I had known about the University of Oulu workshop and the people
working there sooner. I was very impressed every time I went there asking for some
kind of rack needed for measurements. I was invariably handed a device that did
exactly what I wished. In addition, the production of printed circuit boards has been
invaluable for prototyping. Thanks to Jari Pakarinen, Auno Latvalehto, Vesa Kaltio,
and Anssi Rimpiläinen.
My sincere gratitude also goes to my closest friends. We have experienced
many unforgettable moments over the years. Even though the amount of time
together is not what it used to be, the more valuable various poikien reissut have
become.

10
 You would not be holding this thesis if I had not had the support received from
my family. To my beloved wife, Saara: thank you for having endless patience with
my long workdays and occasional long work trips. Despite these, you have had the
energy to encourage me during the overall doctoral journey. To our lovely children,
Luukas and Venla: you have also supported me by reminding me what the really
important things in life are. You make sure that I forget all the work-related matters
for a while when I am at home. My parents, Tyyne and Jorma, and my sister, Piia,
have been the reliable and supportive family members throughout my whole life.
You have really helped especially in day-to-day life by babysitting our children and
helping with the inevitable chores. This has really meant, a lot and I am ever
grateful for that. My father-in-law, Oiva, and my late mother-in-law, Raakel, the
kindest person I have been fortunate to meet, have both been a very important part
of my support network since the day we met eight years ago. Raakel is deeply
missed by all of us.

11
12
Symbols and abbreviations
A amplitude
B path loss intercept
Bf fractional bandwidth
BW bandwidth
c wave speed
d distance
d0 reference distance
ds travelled distance within symbol time
EPL expected path loss
fc center frequency
fH upper frequency
fL lower frequency
n path loss exponent
PL measured path loss
Rb bit rate
RPM rounds per minute
S21 forward voltage gain
SF spreading factor
Tc coherence time
Ts symbol time
vsn velocity of a sensor node
α angle of direction
δp penetration depth
εr relative permittivity
σ standard deviation
σSF shadow fading
ω angular velocity
ω0 angular carrier frequency
ωD angular frequency shift
6LoWPAN IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks
ACK acknowledgement
ADR adaptive data rate
Ag/AgCl silver/silver chloride
AoA angle of arrival
API application programming interface

13
BPF band pass filter
BPSK binary phase shift keying
CMOS complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
CO2 carbon dioxide
COTS commercial of-the-shelf
CSMA/CA carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance
CSS chirp spread spectrum
CWC Centre for Wireless Communications
DC direct current
DiCo direct conversion
DPSK differential phase shift keying
DSSS direct sequence spread spectrum
EC-GSM Extended Coverage Global System for Mobile Communications
EIRP effective isotropic radiated power
ETSI European Telecommunications Standards Institute
EU European Union
EUI extended unique identifier
FDMA frequency division multiple access
FEC forward error correction
FFD full function device
FHSS frequency hopping spread spectrum
FM frequency modulation
FSDT frequency selective digital transmission
FSK frequency shift keying
FSPL free space path loss
GFSK Gaussian frequency shift keying
GMSK Gaussian minimum shift keying
GOOK Gaussian on-off keying
GPS global positioning system
GSM Global System for Mobile Communications
HBC human body communications
IC integrated circuit
ICMP Internet control message protocol
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
IF intermediate frequency
IoT internet of things
14
IPv6 internet protocol version 6
ISM industrial, scientific, and medical
IR impulse radio
ITEE Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
LBT AFA listen before talk adaptive frequency agility
LoS line-of-sight
LPF low pass filter
LPWAN low-power wide area network
LTE Long Term Evolution
LTE-M Long Term Evolution for Machine-Type Communications
MAC medium access control
MCU microcontroller
MEMS microelectromechanical system
MICS medical implant communications service
NB-Fi Narrowband Fidelity
NB-IoT narrowband IoT
NFC near-field communications
NLOS non-line-of-sight
OFDM orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
O-QPSK offset quadrature phase shift keying
OOK on-off keying
OS operating system
OSI open system interconnection
PER packet error rate
PHY physical layer
PLL phase-locked loop
QoS quality of service
RA router advertisement
RF radio frequency
RFC request for comments
RFD reduced function device
RFID radio frequency identification
RSSI received signal strength indication
SH-WSN soft handover method for wireless sensor networks
SIG Special Interest Group
SotA state-of-the-art
SRO superregenerative oscillator
15
TDMA time division multiple access
URL uniform resource locator
UWB ultra wideband
WBAN wireless body area network
Wi-SUN wireless smart ubiquitous network
WLAN wireless local area network
WMTS wireless medical telemetry service
WNAN wireless near area network
WPAN wireless personal area network
WPT wireless power transfer
WS&AN wireless sensor and actuator network
WSN wireless sensor network
WUR wake-up receiver

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Contents
Abstract
Tiivistelmä
Preface 9
Symbols and abbreviations 13
Contents 17
1 Introduction 19
1.1 Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks .................................... 20
1.2 Motivation ............................................................................................... 22
1.3 Author’s contributions and outline of the thesis ..................................... 24
2 Human body communications 27
2.1 Wireless body area network .................................................................... 27
2.2 Overview of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard ................................................ 29
2.3 Background of human body communications ......................................... 31
2.4 Dielectric properties of a human body .................................................... 33
2.5 Impact of the electrode location on the path loss .................................... 34
2.6 Summary ................................................................................................. 37
3 Towards batteryless wireless sensor networks 39
3.1 Wireless personal area network ............................................................... 40
3.2 Overview of the Bluetooth Low Energy standards ................................. 42
3.3 Overview of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard ................................................ 43
3.4 IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks ........................... 44
3.5 Wake-up receivers ................................................................................... 44
3.5.1 Architectures ................................................................................ 45
3.5.2 Comparison of wake-up receivers ................................................ 49
3.5.3 Summary and future research directions ...................................... 51
3.6 Controllable energy source for energy harvesting-powered sensor
nodes ....................................................................................................... 52
3.6.1 Description of the proposed system.............................................. 53
3.6.2 Implementation ............................................................................. 54
3.6.3 Summary ...................................................................................... 56
3.7 Mobility management in wireless sensor networks ................................ 56
3.7.1 Related work................................................................................. 57
3.7.2 Soft handover method................................................................... 59
3.8 Summary ................................................................................................. 61

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4 LoRa wide area network 63
4.1 Low-power wide area network ................................................................ 63
4.2 Overview of LoRa technology ................................................................ 67
4.2.1 Network architecture .................................................................... 67
4.2.2 Physical layer................................................................................ 68
4.2.3 Medium access control ................................................................. 69
4.3 Performance evaluation of LoRa technology .......................................... 69
4.3.1 Outdoor coverage ......................................................................... 72
4.3.2 Channel attenuation model ........................................................... 76
4.3.3 Resistance against Doppler effect ................................................. 78
4.3.4 Indoor coverage ............................................................................ 86
4.4 Summary ................................................................................................. 92
5 Conclusions and future work 93
List of references 97

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1 Introduction
The vast scale of different sensing and actuation application possibilities have
driven wireless sensor network (WSN) research for more than 15 years now to a
point where imagined massive scale sensor node deployments are becoming a
reality. Recent technological developments have made the manufacture of low-cost
wireless sensing devices with sufficiently long battery life possible. It has made
various wireless sensoring applications affordable to consumers. The sensor nodes
can be set to monitor, e.g., assets, people’s well-being, habitats, the condition of
various machinery, parking spot usage, and the environment in homes and
properties. Various monitoring applications have, not surprisingly, different
requirements for wireless data transfer. For example, the usage of a parking spot
could be reported to a system via a gateway that could be kilometers away only
when a car comes and leaves. The period between message transfers can be hours,
or even more during the night. When a human is being monitored, the distance
between a sensor and a smart phone, which could act as a gateway, is in the range
of some meters. In addition, the amount of sensor data to be transferred can be
hundreds of times more than in the parking spot monitoring application.
The varying applications can be divided into a variety of wireless network
groups, based on the communications distance. In this thesis, the focus is on the
low-power radio technologies that potentially enable years of service life without
recharging or changing batteries. In some applications, the sensor nodes could be
powered only with energy harvesting. Fig. 1 shows the wireless network options
where low-power wireless technologies operate. A wireless near area network
(WNAN) includes near-field communications (NFC) and passive radio-frequency
identification (RFID) technologies that can establish a link if devices are within
four centimeters away from each other [1]. A wireless body area network (WBAN)
covers communications in or on a human body. Thus, typically the link distance is
not more than two meters. The range of a wireless personal area network (WPAN)
is around 10 to 30 meters in typical deployment environments suitable for, e.g.,
home automation applications such as control over lighting and an entertainment
system. Larger real estates – such as hospitals, schools, and office buildings – can
be monitored conveniently with a low-power wide area network (LPWAN). Under
line-of-sight (LoS) conditions, the communications range of a LPWAN is over 10
km [2], and indoors one gateway can potentially cover a large area of real estate
[3].

19
Fig. 1. Distance between a transmitter and a receiver, and typical application areas of
various low-power wireless networks ([2], published by permission of SAGE
publishing).

A network where a sensor node can do actuations (e.g., turn a switch on/off) is often
referred to as a wireless sensor and actuator network (WS&AN). In this work, the
term sensor node is used to describe a sensor node that can communicate with other
devices via a wireless transceiver, capable of monitoring the environment with
sensors and executing actuations.

1.1 Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks

At the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, various devices are becoming smart,
or at least smarter than they used to be, by enabling them to function autonomously
and still have control over them. These things can be set to transmit information on
the environment or allow actuations such as switching a sauna stove on. The term
“Internet of Things” and its acronym “IoT” have become widely accepted
buzzwords since 2009, but the term was coined by Kevin Ashton already in 1999

20
Fig. 2. Modular research and development IoT platform designed at the Centre for
Wireless Communications, University of Oulu ([5], published by permission of IEEE).

[4]. Ashton used the term to cover both wired and wireless devices that are
connected to the existing internet infrastructure. WSN can be seen as forming a big
part of the IoT, but not all WSNs require connectivity to the Internet, i.e., they
operate locally. In the academia, the focus of the WSN research has been on simple,
low-power, wireless sensor nodes with restricted capabilities and networking
between them. Typically, a sensor node includes a processing unit with memory,
sensors, a power source, and a radio frequency (RF) transceiver. Fig. 2 shows an
example sensor node that is designed at the Centre for Wireless Communications,
University of Oulu, and has been used widely in research and marketing activities
[5–10].
In 2002, Akyildiz et al. published two highly cited surveys about WSNs [11,
12]. In these surveys, different application possibilities are listed, a sensor network
protocol stack is described layer by layer, and various design problems have been
outlined for each layer. After that, vast number of solutions for all the layers have
been proposed by the academia and industry that have made it possible for the IoT
to emerge in global markets. Subsequently, an abundance of commercial IoT
devices is starting to be available, even for applications that some may question
with regard to their necessity but that may become widely accepted in the near
future. Therefore, from the technological point of view, it is seen that the IoT is

21
quite mature already. However, is IoT still considered mature if the number of IoT
devices is set to increase exponentially within the next few years?

1.2 Motivation

Gartner, a technology research and advisory firm, estimates that there will be 20.8
billion IoT devices in 2020 [13]. IHS, a market information and analysis firm,
estimated the number of devices to be 37.9 billion [14], and Ericsson’s estimate
was 24 billion IoT devices [15]. Regardless of what the exact number will be in
2020, most likely there will be an enormous amount of new devices connected to
the Internet. The number of radios may be even higher, since a device may be
equipped with multiple radios, assuming that a large number of IoT devices will
communicate via air. More wireless devices mean that there will be more
interference, but on the other hand, new millimeter wavebands will be exploited
that will ease the situation. While millimeter wave research is getting a lot of
interest from both academia [16, 17] and industry [18], in this thesis a glance is
being taken in another direction towards the lower frequency bands, i.e., less than
100 MHz frequencies. They are getting less attention but might have significant
impact with respect to how communications are implemented in future WBANs.
The estimates of tens of billions IoT devices is most probably based on the
number of potential applications ranging from healthcare to the military, home
automation, and infrastructure-based and industrial monitoring. Various
applications should be implemented with the most suitable wireless radio
technology for links ranging from a few centimeters to dozens of kilometers. Many
of these long-distance applications do not require a large bandwidth, and
transmitting measured data only once per hour is enough. For this type of
application, a LPWAN could be the most cost-efficient way to establish monitoring
wirelessly. Since LPWANs did not have much attention from academia before 2015,
in this thesis one LPWAN technology, i.e., LoRa, is studied, and its performance in
terms of Doppler robustness and coverage is also evaluated. The former is studied
because there is also an abundant number of potential asset tracking applications in
which a sensor node is mobile.
Even though various wireless IoT devices are already available as commercial-
off-the-shelf (COTS), there is still a significant need for research in order to
improve, e.g., the energy efficiency that would decrease the maintenance costs and
an ecological footprint. For example, a proposal for a certain issue, e.g., improving
the service life of a sensor node, may come with a tradeoff. Many medium access
22
control (MAC) protocols use duty cycling in order to save the energy in comparison
with an always-on approach [19–21]. This means that the sensor node periodically
switches between a low-power sleep mode and a receive mode. This approach
reduces sensor node’s energy consumption, but as a drawback, the sensor nodes
still waste energy for idle listening, i.e., useless channel listening when there are no
incoming signals. By increasing the time in sleep mode, less energy is consumed,
but as a tradeoff, the latency for delivering a message is increased.
Therefore, in this thesis a wake-up receiver (WUR) concept is also studied.
The usage of the WUR improves sensor node energy efficiency and still provides
low latency communications. However, it is noted that the utilization of the WUR
brings new tradeoffs. So far, the WUR designs have either been separate integrated
circuits (IC) or they have been built with discrete components, so a sensor node
needs to be equipped with more hardware. On the other hand, utilization of a WUR
can make the MAC design simpler, thus saving time and effort on software
development. Moreover, it is expected that after WURs develop to a certain level,
they will be integrated into the same chip with the data radio.
The estimated huge increase in the number of IoT devices will inevitably raise
many issues. In a generic level, this thesis gives answers to the following concerns:
– how to fight against interference when the number of sensor nodes is increased
massively,
– how to get rid of tedious battery change or charge operation,
– how to deploy sensor nodes cost efficiently, and
– what needs to be taken into account in applications that involve mobility?

As one might expect, each point is a vast topic on its own, but in this thesis possible
approaches are discussed with regard to how to solve them on the general level and
contribute new results to knowledge gaps that help the research and industry
community to put together the technological puzzle. The research gaps studied are
mainly at the physical layer (PHY) and in the channel characteristics, but there is a
need to take the transport layer also into account when discussing handover-related
issues in mobile scenarios.
Even though there is still room for performance improvements, the IoT as a
technology is quite developed, enabling the production of various kinds of
prototypes and trying them in a variety of wireless/wired networks. Therefore, the
research method throughout the thesis is for the most part empirical. Similar
findings most probably could have been obtained using other approaches, such as
mathematical analysis or simulations. However, empirical studies are often needed

23
before research findings can be used in commercial products. The empirical
measurements were designed to provide answers to research questions and to
document the setups in the necessary detail required to enable repetition of the
measurements when required.

1.3 Author’s contributions and outline of the thesis

This doctoral thesis is based on five international journal articles [2, 3, 22–24], four
international conference papers [5, 25–27], and one book chapter [28]. The thesis
focuses on low-power wireless IoT communications in three network classes,
namely the WBAN, WPAN and LPWAN, based on the wireless communications
distance shown in Fig. 1. Even though the WNANs are beyond the scope of this
thesis, NFC technology has still been exploited to program wireless sensor nodes
used in some of the practical deployments and measurements.
In Chapter 2, the focus is on the WBANs. The latest IEEE standard for the
WBAN is the 802.15.6-2012, which includes three options for the PHY: ultra
wideband (UWB), narrowband, and human body communications (HBC). First, the
basics of HBC are introduced. After this, the results of signal attenuation
measurements with varying electrode locations are presented [22]. The author
planned and conducted the measurements, and analyzed the results.
The WPANs are addressed in Chapter 3. The goal is to enable a WPAN sensor
node to operate without a battery and guarantee certain quality of service (QoS).
Two major components that can make this happen are the energy efficiency of the
sensor node and a reliable external power source. Energy efficiency can be
improved by utilizing a WUR. Based on [23, 24], a comparison of state-of-the-art
WURs is presented. The comparison includes the author’s WUR proposal, based
on the superregenerative principle [9], but the details of the design are beyond the
scope of this thesis. Moreover, future WUR research directions are discussed
(based on [28]). After this, based on [5], a system is proposed where an energy
harvesting-powered sensor node is able to control a smart lighting system that can
provide energy for the sensor node. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was utilized for
wireless communications between the sensor node and the smart lighting system.
The author, together with M. Sc. Jarkko Kaleva and M. Sc. Konstantin Mikhaylov,
were responsible for implementing the sensor node, while Helvar Oy Ab (an energy
efficient lighting solutions provider) made the necessary configurations for the
lighting system. The idea is based on an invention disclosure submitted by the
author and M. Sc. Konstantin Mikhaylov. Finally, based on [27], the author
24
designed, implemented and presented the results of a soft handover method suitable
for mobile sensor nodes that could exploit the WUR concept.
The LPWANs are covered in Chapter 4. One valid option for implementing a
LPWAN is the LoRa technology. In this thesis, its performance is evaluated with
analysis and measurements. The author analyzed and measured the robustness of
the LoRa technology under the Doppler effect [2]. The outdoor coverage was
measured by the author in collaboration with Nokia Ltd. The author processed data
and the results of the measurements are reported (based on [25]). The conference
paper also included a channel attenuation model drawn from the results. The author
created the model under the guidance of M. Sc. Antti Roivainen. The indoor
coverage for the same technology is reported in [26], which was extended with
more measurement data in [3]. Part of the measurement campaign in [3] was
conducted by Rumana Yasmin, who was studying for her Master’s degree at the
time.
To sum up, the main contributions of this thesis are:
– To show that there is an impact of an electrode location to the signal attenuation
in human body communications
i) Planning and conducting the measurements and analysis of the results
– A proposal for a system that enables energy harvesting-powered sensor nodes
to control an energy source
i) Invention of the system together with M. Sc. Konstantin Mikhaylov
ii) Designing the implementation in collaboration with Helvar Oy Ab
iii) Implementation of the system with M. Sc. Jarkko Kaleva, M. Sc.
Konstantin Mikhaylov, and Helvar Oy Ab
– Comparison of energy-efficient, low-latency wake-up receivers and a
discussion of future research directions
– Proposal for a soft handover method for mobile sensor nodes that supports the
utilization of a wake-up receiver
i) Design, implementation, and verification of the operation as a part of
a full-scale testbed
– Extensive evaluation of the LoRa LPWAN technology in terms of coverage
and mobility
i) Analysis and measurements of the robustness of the LoRa technology
under the Doppler effect
ii) Measuring the outdoor coverage in collaboration with Nokia Ltd.
iii) Measuring the indoor coverage together with Rumana Yasmin

25
 iv) Analysis and presentation of the results of both outdoor and indoor
measurements
v) Building a channel attenuation model for LoRa technology
– Conclusions and discussion of the meaningfulness of the proposed solutions
and results presented in Chapter 5
Furthermore, the author has contributed to numerous publications during
doctoral studies in research projects not directly related to this thesis. The journal
articles are [6, 10] and the conference papers are [7–9, 29–40].

26
2 Human body communications
Human body communications use the human body as a medium to transfer signals,
e.g., between WBAN sensor nodes. In this chapter, WBAN, HBC, and the IEEE
802.15.6 standard (includes the HBC PHY option) are introduced. In addition, new
results about HBC channel characteristics are presented.

2.1 Wireless body area network

Recent technological developments have made it possible to place low-power and

low-cost wireless sensor nodes in or on the human body. These sensor nodes form
a WBAN. Especially the development of micro-electro-mechanical systems
(MEMS) and integrated circuit (IC) technologies have enabled miniaturization,
which is highly important in order to make unobtrusive networks [41]. Fig. 3 shows
a WBAN that utilizes a star topology where sensor nodes communicate directly
with a gateway, which is typically considered of having connectivity to a backbone
network and sufficient resources for processing in terms of energy and processing
power. The sensor nodes should be highly energy-efficient to enable a long
operation period without the need to change batteries. Another interesting method
to power up the sensor nodes is to harvest the energy from the environment.
The WBAN is suitable for many interesting applications, such as entertainment
and personal health monitoring. A physiological sensor can measure, e.g., body
temperature, heart rate, electromyography, and electrocardiography [42]. Medical
sensors in combination with wireless solutions enable the monitoring of people
remotely. Monitoring, in particular, the elderly and people in poor health remotely
is a very timely topic, since in many developed countries the average age of
population is increasing [41, 43]. This is mostly due to the retirement of baby
boomers [44] and better healthcare, which has led to longer lifetimes [41]. For this
reason, there is a need for more effective methods in order to take care of a higher
number of elderly people with fewer younger people. One step towards this is to
replace wired monitoring solutions with wireless ones that allow people to move
around independently, and to monitor their physiological parameters.

27
Fig. 3. Main components of a gateway and sensor nodes that form a wireless body area
network ([22], published by permission of Springer).

The need for such solutions has driven standardization activities for WBANs
during the recent years. IEEE published the 802.15.6 standard for WBANs in 2012
[45], which targets the provision of reliable communications in and around the
human body. The standard supports data rates from less than 100 kbps up to 15.6
Mbps.

28
 An overview of the standard is given in Section 2.2. The IEEE 802.15.4
standard is mainly targeted at WPANs. Nevertheless, IEEE made an amendment in
2013 to support WBAN applications in the 2360 – 2400 MHz band [46].
Furthermore, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is also
developing a standard for WBANs. It founded a technical committee (SmartBAN)
in 2013 [47]. The focus of the SmartBAN standard is to define PHY and MAC
layers suitable for healthcare, wellness and sport-related applications.
Even though there are standards for the WBAN, there is still a vast number of
challenges that need to be resolved before WBANs can become widely accepted
for, e.g., remote patient-monitoring use. Hanson et al. listed in [48] the
requirements for widespread adoption: the WBANs must improve quality of life;
the devices have to be safe to use; unauthorized access must be prevented; personal
health data must be available only to the allowed persons; interoperability between
various WBANs must be assured; and the devices need to be easy to use, ergonomic,
and unobtrusive.

2.2 Overview of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard

In 2012, IEEE released the 802.15.6 standard for WBANs [45] that describes short-
range communications in and around a body, but not limited only to a human body
(the standard should also be utilizable in animals). The goal of the standard is to
provide reliable wireless communications using low-power, and provide data rates
of over 10 Mbps. The standard defines three PHY options and a MAC above them,
which can be configured dynamically to work with various PHYs. The PHY
options are UWB, HBC, and narrowband. As the name reveals, UWB radio
technology uses large bandwidth (over 500 MHz) to transfer information. If the
bandwidth is less than 500 MHz, it is defined that the fractional bandwidth must be
greater than 0.2 to consider a signal as UWB. The fractional bandwidth is expressed
as [49]
H L
=2 (1)
H L

where fH and fL are the signal’s upper and lower frequencies, respectively. Data
rates are up to 15.60 Mbps with impulse radio (IR)-UWB, and 250 kbps when
frequency modulation (FM)-UWB is utilized. Large bandwidth in UWB provides
good time resolution, which can be used for accurate two-way ranging. In addition
to the standard, the UWB PHY is also described in detail in [50].

29
Fig. 4. Frequency bands defined in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for HBC, narrowband,
and UWB.

Narrowband PHY is more conventional than UWB or HBC, i.e., similar PHYs are
used in other wireless networks beside WBAN. It can operate in different industrial,
scientific, and medical (ISM) and medical implant communications service (MICS)
bands, depending on the region. π/M-DPSK (differential phase shift keying)
modulation method is used in all of the bands except in 420 – 450 MHz, where
Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) is utilized. Data rates vary between 57.5
kbps and 971.4 kbps, depending on the band and configurations. [45, 51]
The IEEE 802.15.6 HBC PHY option utilizes the human body as a transmission
medium by utilizing electric field communications technology. The center
frequency for communications is 21 MHz, which is significantly lower than in
UWB and narrowband PHYs. The modulation defined in the standard uses
frequency shift codes to spread the data, hence the modulation is referred to as
frequency selective digital transmission (FSDT). The minimum and maximum
supported data rates are 164 kbps and 1.3125 Mbps, respectively. To ensure safety
for the human body, local regulations must be followed, but also the standard sets
a limit on the electric field strength emitted by an electrode. The strength must not
exceed 30 µV/m, measured from a distance of 30 m in free space. [45]
Fig. 4 shows the frequency bands defined in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard [45].
Narrowband includes MICS, wireless medical telemetry service (WMTS), and ISM
bands, but their usage depends on the region’s regulations. Only the 2400 – 2483.5
MHz ISM frequency band can be used worldwide.
The MAC specified in the standard supports all three PHYs described above.
According to the standard, there are two MAC modes: beacon and non-beacon.
Since the topology is a one- or two-hop star, a central hub coordinates
communications. In the beacon mode, the hub transmits beacons periodically that

30
allocate individual slots of the superframe for all the sensor nodes. In the non-
beacon mode, a sensor node can access the channel by using carrier sense multiple
access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). If the sensor node needs data from
the central hub, it needs to transmit polling frames. [41, 45, 51]

2.3 Background of human body communications

T. G. Zimmerman and N. Gershenfeld realized in 1996 that data could be sent using
the human body as a transmission medium, by modulating the induced electric field
[52]. Nowadays, the technology is mostly referred as HBC, but other terms have
been used as well; such as intrabody communications and body channel
communications. HBC enables interesting new application possibilities: business
cards can be exchanged by a handshake [52]; secure doors can be opened without
showing keys [53]; and photos taken with a mobile phone can be printed just by
touching a printer [54]. From the security perspective, HBC is an interesting option
since it does not use air as a medium, making it more difficult to eavesdrop.
However, it should be noticed that at higher frequencies the human body starts to
act as an antenna [55]. In the context of HBC, when the human body starts to act
as an antenna, it is typically considered to be an unwanted feature. It makes
eavesdropping possible and it creates interference by receiving undesired signals.
There are two main coupling methods for communications over the human
body, namely galvanic and capacitive. In the galvanic coupling, two signals are
applied that are received differentially by two electrodes, so a reference ground
plane is not required: i.e., signals are electrically floating in respect to the ground,
as shown in Fig. 5a. HBC carrier frequency when using galvanic coupling is
typically very low, less than 1 MHz due to higher losses at higher frequencies. [56,
57]
In the capacitive coupling, an electric field is induced to the human body. By
modulating the electric field, it is possible to transfer information [52]. The on-
body electrode induces the electric field, and the ground plane is needed to create
a return path – as demonstrated in Fig. 5b [55, 58–60]. The need for the ground
plane makes capacitive coupling more dependent on the environment than the
galvanic coupling approach does. Research works typically consider frequencies
under 200 MHz when, e.g., channel characteristics are modelled or transceiver
prototypes are built. At higher frequencies, the signal undergoes larger attenuation
[58, 61–64].

31
Fig. 5. a) In galvanic coupling, a signal is applied differentially with two electrodes [56,
57]. b) In capacitive coupling, a ground plane is needed to create a return path for the
electric field [55, 58–60].

The differential signal reception in galvanic coupling results in better interference

tolerance than capacitive coupling, but due to the lower frequency band and narrow
bandwidth, it has higher attenuation and lower data rates, respectively [57]. In
addition, the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for HBC PHY is made for higher frequencies
suitable for capacitive coupling. Therefore, in this thesis, the focus is on capacitive
coupling approach.
The quality of an HBC wireless link is affected by a variety of factors. Three
separate commercial electrodes were tested in [56] that were made of silver/silver
chloride (Ag/AgCl). The results showed that the electrodes have significant
frequency dependent characteristic differences in terms of resistance and
capacitance. Different electrodes were also measured in [61]. The results showed
that there was no difference in performance between a bare copper electrode,
copper electrode with gel, and Ag/AgCl. Furthermore, in [56], various electrode
sizes were compared. It was noted that by decreasing the size of the electrode, the
electrode resistance increased. It was subsequently concluded that transmission
characteristics are improved with larger electrodes.

32
 Since in the capacitive coupling a signal needs a return path via the ground, in
[55] the impact of the transmitter’s ground plane size for the human body channel
characteristics was measured. The ground plane size was changed between 24 and
60 cm2. It is reported that there is 3 dB improvement in forward voltage gain (S21)
when the ground plane size is doubled.
The body position also has an impact to the signal attenuation. In [65] the
impact of elbow joint position in 45°, 90°, 135°, and 180° angles is measured. The
results showed differences at frequencies over 60 MHz being over 4 dB at
maximum point between angles 45° and 180°. At lower frequencies, differences
were less significant. Therefore not surprisingly, body movements result in
different HBC channel characteristics [61, 66].
As the signal requires a return path in the capacitive coupling, an environment
plays an important role in the communications. In [61], the impact of two different
environments – namely, an anechoic chamber and a laboratory – is studied. An
electrode was directly connected to a skin and a ground plane was connected to the
ground via air. The results showed that the environment had insignificant impact
on the channel characteristics between these two environments. Also in [61], five
female and six male test volunteers were used in the measurement campaign to find
out the impact of a body structure to S21. The volunteers were between 14 and 27
years old with different heights and body types. It is reported that the results differ
less than 2 dB.
HBC path loss models for different frequencies and distances are introduced,
e.g., in [58, 59]. The distance is changed step-by-step with a certain interval, so
special attention is not paid to the location of the electrode. Therefore, in this thesis
the impact of various electrode locations on the path loss is studied.

2.4 Dielectric properties of a human body

The human body consists of different types of tissues, so it is not uniform. The
tissues conduct electric current poorly, i.e., they are dielectrics, and each tissue has
unique dielectric properties. Although the human tissues are poor conductors, they
can be used to hold an electrostatic field, and that characteristic is exploited in HBC
by modulating the induced electrostatic field.
The dielectric properties of body tissues at different frequencies are available
online from a commonly used database [67]. The database is based on work
published in 1996 by C. Gabriel [68]. In the work C. Gabriel developed a dielectric
measurement technique that was used to measure over 25 tissues in the frequency
33
Fig. 6. a) Relative permittivity and b) penetration depth in human tissues ([22], published
by permission of Springer).

range of 1 MHz to 20 GHz [68]. The database was utilized to get the values for Fig.
6 that shows relative permittivity (εr) and penetration depth (δp) in the frequency
range between 20 and 45 MHz. The relative permittivity (also known as dielectric
constant) describes the material’s ability to store energy in an electric field [69].
The penetration depth, in the context of HBC, characterizes how deep
electromagnetic propagation can penetrate into a tissue. At frequencies suitable for
HBC, the electromagnetic field penetrates both dry and wet skin. Therefore, the
propagation will also take place inside the human body.

2.5 Impact of the electrode location on the path loss

In most of the scenarios presented in research papers, an electrode is used to create

efficient capacitive coupling between a sensor node and a human body. Thus in
those scenarios, the electrode is connected to a human’s skin. As presented in the
previous section, dielectric properties vary significantly between different tissues.

34
Fig. 7. In the path loss measurements, the electrodes are used to create the capacitive
coupling that enables wireless communication ([22], published by permission of
Springer).

In this work, whether tissues below the skin have impact on signal attenuation is
studied [22]. As can be noted from Fig. 6b, the electric field penetrates the skin
where the electrodes are typically connected. Thus, the tissue beneath the skin is
expected to have an impact on the electric field strength. Naturally, the human body
consists of dozens of tissues, but it is still rather easy to differentiate whether there
is mainly, e.g., muscle underneath the skin rather than bone. The research method
to study this research problem is empirical. Fig. 7 shows the setup that was used to
conduct the measurements. The locations of the electrodes are chosen based on the
tissue type beneath the dry skin. Tissues of interest are muscle, fat, and cortical
bone. Their dielectric properties are shown in Fig. 6. Keysight’s E4438C signal
generator [70] is used as a transmitter and Keysight’s 8594E spectrum analyzer as
a receiver [71]. Both devices are grounded. The electrodes used in the
measurements were commercial and made of Ag/AgCl. The electrodes were
connected to the signal generator and the spectrum analyzer with coaxial cables.
The distance between the electrodes in the measurements was fixed to 20 cm during
the measurement campaign. This enabled the possibility to find appropriate places
for measuring different tissue types. The signal generator was configured to
transmit continuous wave between frequencies 20 MHz and 45 MHz with 5 MHz
35
Fig. 8. The impact of the electrode position on the path loss for 20 cm HBC link ([22],
published by permission of Springer).

steps. With each frequency, all the tissue combinations were measured, which are
muscle-to-muscle, muscle-to-fat, muscle-to-bone, fat-to-fat, fat-to-muscle, fat-to-
bone, and bone-to-bone. All the measurement points were located in the upper body.
One body structure (i.e., one person) was used in the measurements. The
person was 180 cm of height and during the measurements was normal weight
according to the body mass index. Each measurement point was measured five
times for all the frequencies. Since the data set was small, it was possible to see that
the variation between values was insignificant, so there was no need to repeat the
measurements more. Measurements were carried out in a typical office
environment.
The results of the path loss measurements are shown in Fig. 8. As can be seen,
the location of the electrodes has significant impact on the path loss. For example,
when both electrodes are attached to the dry skin above the bone, the path loss is
over 4 dB smaller compared to the case when both electrodes are in a skin location

36
that has tissue underneath containing fat. The difference is significant and should
be taken into account when doing research and designing applications.
The results show the general trend that path loss decreases when frequency
increases in this particular frequency range. This follows the same trend as in [58,
59]. However, in a recent work by Park et al. [72], various measurement setups are
introduced, and there is significant difference in the results between them. This
suggests that there is still research to be done for coming up with conventions for
measuring channel characteristics in HBC. For this reason, the results shown in the
work concerned indicate only that the location of the electrode has impact on the
path loss, but the path loss values are not necessarily what one might expect if using
a mobile HBC compliant sensor node. This is because the return path of the signal
is closed through the power lines and not the environment, as it would be in the
case of wireless mobile devices.

2.6 Summary

This chapter introduced the basic concept of a WBAN, which can be used for
applications from healthcare to entertainment and sports. The importance of
WBANs can be seen in the recent standardization activities. IEEE released
802.15.6 standard in 2012 with the focus to define PHY and MAC layers for
WBANs. The IEEE also made an amendment to IEEE 802.15.4 standard to support
the 2360 – 2400 MHz band in the United States to off-load the wireless local area
network (WLAN) frequency bands. Furthermore, ETSI has started its own
standardization activities related to WBANs in 2013 by forming a technical
committee called SmartBAN, which focuses on short links operating around a
human body.
One PHY option in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard defines the methods that can
be used to exploit the human body as a communications channel. Even though the
standard was released over five years ago, there are no commercial devices
available, as far as the author is aware. There are hundreds of scientific articles of
the HBC alone in the IEEE digital library, but perhaps the HBC technology is not
yet mature enough to reach widespread adoption. So far, the practical research
works have been done using expensive signal generators and spectrum analyzers,
or a research group has built its own prototype. Therefore, it is challenging, e.g.,
for a researcher interested in applications to see whether HBC adds value compared
to, e.g., Bluetooth or UWB. Standard compliant transceivers and commercially
available wireless development kits could pave the way towards actual products.
37
 Furthermore, the human body is a complex communications channel. As
described in this chapter, the channel characteristics are dependent on at least the
following factors: an electrode material and size, operation frequency, coupling
between the transceiver and the human body, distance between the transmitter and
the receiver, size of the transmitter’s and receiver’s ground planes, the body
structure, body position, and movement of the body. Furthermore, in this thesis it
is reported that the location of an electrode also has an impact on the channel
characteristics.

38
3 Towards batteryless wireless sensor
networks
Today wireless sensor nodes are mainly battery powered, i.e., they are able to
handle assigned tasks with energy stored in a battery. The development of batteries,
hardware and protocol design have enabled COTS sensor nodes to have a service
life of several years. Even a ten-year service life could already be possible by using
high capacity batteries (e.g., made of lithium), by limiting the number of messages
sent per day, and by deploying the sensor nodes at a location with small temperature
variations. That sounds promising, but in many applications, there is a need to
deploy the sensor nodes outdoors where temperature variations can be large, as well
as transmit more often than a couple of times per day, which already limits the
service life considerably.
Changing batteries is an undesirable and tedious task. It is also an expensive
one when an employee needs to be assigned for the purpose. If the predictions of
tens of billions of IoT devices become a reality, the task starts to be close to
impossible, even if part of these IoT devices are powered from the mains. Therefore,
one possible heading for this problem is to make wireless sensor nodes batteryless:
i.e., the sensor nodes would harvest the needed energy from the environment.
Undoubtedly, there are many IoT applications that have high QoS requirements that
cannot be, at least at the moment, delivered with energy harvesting. On the other
hand, there are also applications that could function solely with energy harvesting.
In these applications, the service life would not be specified by battery capacity but
rather by the quality of the components used in the sensor node. There are other
solutions to this problem besides energy harvesting. One option is to design a
wireless sensor node to last for the required service life. After that, the sensor node
is collected and recycled. Alternatively, the sensor node could be made of
biodegradable material, so there would no need to collect it.
The sensor node can harvest energy from multiple sources, for example: light,
electromagnetic field, temperature difference, vibration, and ambient RF signals
[38]. A photovoltaic panel can be used to harvest energy from light. Especially
outdoors under direct sunlight, the sensor node can easily harvest the needed energy.
Indoors, due to the narrower bandwidth of artificial lighting compared to the light
coming from the sun, it is more challenging but nevertheless still feasible. The
energy sources are application and location specific – e.g., in a city, it is possible to
gather more energy from ambient RF signals than in rural or outback areas.
Furthermore, with SotA energy harvesting methods, the available energy cannot be
39
converted into usable energy with 100% efficiency. The maximum efficiency of the
photovoltaic cell now is 46% [73]. Other energy harvesting methods can make the
conversion more efficiently, e.g., 83% efficiency is achieved in [74] with
piezoelectric, but the overall collected energy is still small compared to what can
be obtained from light [38]. Therefore, there is a need to make the current sensor
nodes energy-friendlier, even than they are today. In this chapter, the focus is on
WPANs and on two methods that would make wireless sensor nodes one step closer
to being batteryless. First, a WUR concept is presented that can increase the energy
efficiency of the sensor node. Second, a novel control loop is introduced that
enables a batteryless sensor node to exert control over a power source. The system
prevents, or at least diminishes, the possibility that the sensor node would not run
out of energy.

3.1 Wireless personal area network

WPANs consist of devices that are interconnected wirelessly within the person’s
personal area, e.g., at home where a wireless range of a few dozen meters is
sufficient. There are several radio technologies for connecting the devices, such as
WLAN [75], Bluetooth [76], Z-wave [77], ZigBee [78], and UWB [79]. Nowadays,
WLAN and Bluetooth technologies are very common in households and
workplaces. WLAN connects various devices (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, printers,
and game stations) to the Internet, while Bluetooth is used to connect peripherals
of these devices (e.g., controllers to a game station or a smart temperature meter to
a mobile phone). Table 1 introduces common low-power radio technologies
suitable for WPAN purposes. WLAN is not included because it is not considered
to be a low-power radio technology in this work. However, the WLAN standard
family has also been extended to provide low-power capabilities. In 2016, IEEE
802.11ah was released that defines operation in the license-exempt sub GHz bands
[80]. At the time of writing, the author was not able to find commercial chips.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see whether the 802.11ah will gain ground in
low-power wireless transceiver markets.
Currently Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is responsible for Bluetooth
standardization related activities [76]. There are several Bluetooth standard
versions, but the versions after 4.0 include the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) option,
designed for applications where long device service life is an important parameter.
In December 2016, Bluetooth SIG released the new Bluetooth version 5.0
specification that includes increased range and data rate, among other features [81].
40
Brief overview of the BLE specifications are introduced in Section 3.2. The
research work presented in this work is done based on v4.2 [82] (Section 3.6), and
therefore Table 1 shows information related to that.
The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines PHY and MAC layers that enable low-
power communications at three ISM bands [83]. Several application specific
protocol stacks have been implemented on top of the 802.15.4 standard, such as
ZigBee, ISA100.11a, and WirelessHART. ZigBee is probably the most well-known
technology for the general public. Data rates in ZigBee vary between 20 kbps and
250 kbps depending on the frequency band. The topology of the ZigBee network
can be a star or a mesh. An overview of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is given in
Section 3.3.
Z-wave is not that well-known by general public as WLAN and Bluetooth but
over 70 million products have been sold, mostly for controlling and monitoring
applications in home automation [77]. The PHY and MAC layers of the Z-Wave
are defined in the ITU-T Recommendation G.9959 [84]. The Z-Wave operates in
the unlicensed ISM sub-GHz and can establish a mesh network without a
coordinator.
UWB is gradually getting more interest especially in localization applications,
but so far, it is rarely used in other WPAN applications. UWB based PHY is defined,
e.g., in the IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 standards, which is introduced in
Section 2.2.

Table 1. Common low-power radio technologies for WPAN ([22], published by

permission of Springer).

Bluetooth Low Energy ZigBee Z-Wave Impulse radio–UWB

Standard Bluetooth v4.2 [82] IEEE 802.15.4 [83] ITU G.9959 [84] IEEE 802.15.6 [45]
Frequency 2450 MHz 868 / 915 / 2450 MHz 868 / 915 MHz 3994 / 8237 MHz
Data rate 1 Mbps ≤ 250 kbps ≤ 100 kbps ≤ 15.6 Mbps
Range < 100 m < 100 m < 100 m < 20 m
Topology Piconet, scatternet Star, mesh Mesh Star
Applications Fitness, healthcare, Home and industry Home and industry Localization,
entertainment, home automation automation healthcare
automation

41
3.2 Overview of the Bluetooth Low Energy standards

BLE versions 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2

The Bluetooth specification v4.0 was released in June 2010. The v4.0 was the first
Bluetooth specification that included a separate volume for Low Energy
communications. The BLE is based on Wibree technology first introduced by
Nokia in 2006 [85]. The v4.1 and v4.2 specifications introduced several
improvements related to, e.g., privacy, security, message length extensions, and
coexistence with LTE [82]. The BLE is designed to be used in the low-power IoT
applications. Therefore, it does not support voice as Bluetooth Classic does [82].
The BLE has been widely adopted for numerous wireless devices during the last
years.
The BLE uses Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) modulation at 2.4 GHz
ISM band, and it employs frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) to fight
against interference. It supports two multiple access options. First, the frequency
division multiple access (FDMA) scheme uses 40 channels that have a bandwidth
of 2 MHz. Three channels are used as advertising channels and the remaining 37
channels are reserved for data transfer. Second option is a time division multiple
access (TDMA) scheme where predetermined time slots are used to communicate
between devices. For a transmitter, the maximum output power is 10 dBm and the
minimum is -20 dBm. [82]
Two or more connected BLE devices form a piconet topology. One of the
devices in the piconet is a master, and the rest of the devices are referred to as slaves.
A BLE device may be part of two or more piconets, but it can be a master only in
one. The specification does not limit the number of slaves in the piconet, so it is
implementation dependent: also, any network routing protocols are beyond the
scope of the specification. [82]

BLE version 5.0

The BLE v5.0 brings two major improvements compared to earlier BLE versions:
increased data rate and communications distance. The longer communications
distance is achieved in the BLE v5.0 by enabling a support for forward error
correction (FEC) coding. The downside of using FEC is that it lowers the
application throughput. The PHY also supports higher output power, i.e., the
maximum output power is increased from 10 dBm (in v4.2) to 20 dBm. Without
42
coding, the BLE v5.0 supports a data rate of up to 2 Mbps for short range
communications. [83] Therefore, a longer range and higher data rate cannot be
achieved simultaneously.
The BLE v5.0 is not widely adopted yet in commercial devices such as smart
phones and tablets, but most likely it will be. One important feature that will help
in the adaptation is that v5.0 is backward compatible with previous BLE versions
and new features are optional. However, there are research papers available that
compare BLE versions 4.2 and 5.0. Experimental performance evaluations are
conducted, e.g., in [86, 87]. The results in [86] showed that BLE v5.0 provides
more than a two-fold communications range compared to v4.2 in the LOS scenario,
and almost 20% improvement in the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario.

3.3 Overview of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard

The first version of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that defined low-rate wireless
communications for WPANs was released in 2003. Since then, IEEE has released
versions in 2006 and 2011 that are superseded now by the latest standard 802.15.4-
2015. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the PHY and MAC layers intended for
devices that have limited energy sources. [83]
The standard defines two device types: a full function device (FFD) and a
reduced function device (RFD). The FFD can have varying roles in a network. It
can act as a personal area network (PAN) coordinator, a plain coordinator, and a
device. Conversely, the RFD device has restricted capabilities and is meant to be
used in simple tasks, such as measuring temperature and transferring data to the
coordinator. Therefore, it cannot act as a coordinator but only as the device. [83]
The IEEE 802.15.4-2003 standard defined three PHY options, operating at 868
MHz, 915 MHz and 2.4 GHz bands. At the sub-GHz bands, binary phase shift
keying (BPSK) modulation is employed as well as offset quadrature phase shift
keying (O-QPSK) at 2.4 GHz. All PHY options are based on the direct sequence
spread spectrum (DSSS). Data rates are 20 kbps, 40 kbps, and 250 kbps at 868 MHz,
915 MHz, and 2.4 GHz, respectively. Over the years the number of PHY options
has increased substantially. The latest standard already has 19 different PHY
definitions. [83]
The MAC protocol can operate in two modes: beacon and non-beacon-enabled.
In the beacon-enabled mode, coordinators periodically transmit beacons that
contain information about a superframe structure, e.g.: duration of contention
access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP), number of guaranteed time
43
slots (GTS) and relation between active and inactive periods of the superframe. The
CAP slots can be accessed by any device by using CSMA/CA. GTS slots are
allocated by the coordinator for devices that want to transmit a frame. In the non-
beacon enabled mode, the superframe structure is not used, and devices access the
channel using unslotted CSMA/CA. [83]

3.4 IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) is an open community and its goal
is to “make Internet work better” by defining and maintaining standards related to
the Internet [88]. One working group in the IETF had a goal of defining IPv6 over
low-power WPAN (6LoWPAN) that would enable using IPv6 in simple and
resource-restricted devices. At present, the working group has finished the task and,
as a result, it published several request for comments (RFC) documents available
for everybody. For example, the RFC 4919 [89] provides overview of the
6LoWPAN while the RFCs 4944 [90], 6775 [91], and 6568 [92] define the frame
format, neighbor discovery and use cases, respectively.
The IPv4 is one of the core protocols of the Internet. It was specified already
in 1981 in the RFC 791 and defines addressing and fragmentation [93]. The IPv4
became such a huge success that it started running out of unique address even
though it supports over four billion addresses. Therefore, there was a need to start
designing an update for the IP standard. The IPv6 was specified in 1998 in RFC
2460 and it includes many improvements, including the expansion of the IP address
size from 32 bits to 128 bits [94]. The 6LoWPAN is a lightweight version of the
IPv6. It enables resource-restricted devices to participate in the IoT, using IPv6
efficiently [95]. The RFC 4919 listed several benefits of using the 6LoWPAN [89]:
the IPv6-based devices are easy to connect to the existing IP infrastructure, IP-
based networks are proven to work, it is freely available for everybody, and tools
already exist for management.

3.5 Wake-up receivers

Batteryless sensor nodes can already communicate using, e.g., ZigBee and BLE
[38, 96]. However, when a power source is unavailable, the service life of the sensor
node is limited. To increase the service life, the energy efficiency of the sensor
nodes needs to be improved. One potential technique for this is to equip the sensor
node with a WUR. Typically, the WUR is a fairly simple radio receiver, which is
44
Fig. 9. Example of communications between sensor nodes equipped with wake-up
receivers ([23], published by permission of IEICE).

integrated into a wireless sensor node [97]. The WUR is intended to consume very
low-power. Therefore, it can constantly listen to the radio channel and immediately
awake a microcontroller (MCU) of the sensor node once the correct wake-up signal
is detected. Thereafter, the MCU could use the full-featured RF transceiver for the
actual data transfer, as illustrated in Fig. 9. The two major benefits of using the
WURs are: short response times and significant energy savings compared to duty-
cycle based MAC protocols [31, 98]. The former is achieved since the WUR is
active all the time. The latter is achieved by keeping the MCU and the RF
transceiver in sleep mode that are usually the most energy-hungry components of
the sensor node. The price to pay for this is the slight increase in the complexity,
cost and possibly the size of the sensor node.
The WUR designs have progressed in the last decade in terms of power
consumption and sensitivity [23]. The power consumption of the current state-of-
the-art (SotA) designs is well below 100 µW, which is already 100 times less than
the consumption of a typical commercial RF transceiver. Some of the proposed
research prototypes, e.g., [99, 100], even have the consumption of less than 10 µW.
As a trade-off, the sensitivity of the WURs is typically worse than in the
commercial RF transceivers. Therefore, a transmitter must use more power to reach
the WUR, than to reach the RF data transceivers at the same distance.

3.5.1 Architectures

Nowadays, a direct conversion (DiCo) receiver architecture is popular in

commercial low-power transceivers [101–103]. In the DiCo receivers, the signal is
directly converted from RF to direct current (DC). For this operation, only one

45
oscillator is needed to make the DiCo architecture very power-efficient. Therefore,
it would make a potential architecture option for the WURs. However, there are a
couple of drawbacks. First, the receiver is prone to DC offsets, which is caused by
local oscillator (LO) self-mixing. Second, flicker noise (or 1/f noise) is at the
highest around DC. [104, 105]
In this thesis, a comparison study between proposed WUR design solutions is
conducted [23]. It is noted that currently WURs are based on multiple different
receiver architectures. WURs based on the DiCo architecture have not been
proposed as far the author is aware due to its drawbacks. The most popular receiver
architectures in the literature at the moment are:
– RF envelope detection (RFED),
– injection-locking,
– uncertain intermediate frequency (IF), and
– superregenerative oscillator (SRO).

RF envelope detection

The block diagram of the RFED architecture’s front-end is shown in Fig. 10a. In
the RFED based receiver’s, RF is directly converted to a baseband by detecting the
signal’s envelope, thus omitting the need for LO for down conversion. Envelope
detection detects the signal from a wide bandwidth. Therefore, the signal needs to
be filtered with a band pass filter (BPF) in order to reduce noise.
At the moment, the RFED architecture is the most popular option for WUR
purposes because it is the most straightforward option for power detection and does
not require any power hungry components. The differences between the proposed
solutions are mainly after the low pass filter (LPF) stage. For example, in [99], an
analog correlation unit that provides coding gain for 64-bit wake-up signals is
proposed. The achieved sensitivity of the receiver at 868 MHz is -71 dBm, and the
power consumption is 2.4 µW. Whereas in [100] after envelope detection and
passive amplification with a charge pump, the receiver triggers a wake-up to a
MCU only if the signal’s data rate is higher than a predefined threshold. The
receiver’s power consumption is only 270 nW in static listening mode at 433 MHz
and its sensitivity is -51 dBm. More WURs based on RFED have been introduced
in [106–118].

46
Injection-locking

A generic block diagram of the injection locking-based receiver is shown in Fig.

10b. Injection-locking receiver architecture is typically used for signals that are
modulated with frequency shift keying (FSK). If the received carrier matches, or is
close to, the oscillator’s natural oscillation frequency, the oscillator couples with
the received signal. This is referred to as injection locking. Injection pulling occurs
if the received carrier merely disturbs it, i.e., pulls the oscillator’s signal towards
the received signal, which can be seen at the oscillator’s output.
A WUR introduced in [119] is injection locked at 80 MHz and injection pulled
at 72 MHz. After the envelope detector at the baseband, the signal is amplified.
Subsequently, it is detected whether locking or pulling occurred with a Schmitt
trigger in order to demodulate the FSK signal. The receiver’s sensitivity is -72 dBm
and the power consumption is 45 µW. The demodulator in a receiver proposed in
[120] is implemented with a phase-locked loop (PLL). It achieves sensitivity of
-62.7 dBm and consumes 37.5 µW of power. The injection-locking receivers
proposed in [121] and [122] have sensitivities of -80 dBm and -75 dBm with
respective power consumptions of 38 µW and 54 µW.

Uncertain intermediate frequency

Accurate RF synthesizer designs typically consume too much power in order to use
them in WURs. The uncertain IF architecture makes use of very low-power RF
synthesizers that have, as a tradeoff, poor frequency stability. As a result, after
down conversion, the IF can be located somewhere in a wide frequency range.
Therefore, wideband amplifier is needed to amplify the signal before envelope
detection as shown in Fig. 10c.
The WUR proposed in [123] is based on uncertain IF architecture and uses a
free-running ring oscillator to provide an oscillation between 1.9 and 2.1 GHz. In
the mixer, 2 GHz OOK modulated RF signal is down-converted to IF, located
between DC and 100 MHz. Afterwards, the signal at IF is amplified and converted
to the baseband with envelope detection. The receiver’s power consumption is 52
µW and sensitivity is -72 dBm. Other designs for different frequency bands have
been introduced in [124–128]. The WUR design proposed in [128] has two
uncertain IFs. The receiver achieves a sensitivity of -99 dBm with power
consumption 99 µW.

47
Fig. 10. Commonly used wake-up receiver architectures: a) RF envelope detection, b)
injection-locking, c) uncertain intermediate frequency, and d) superregenerative
oscillator ([23], published by permission of IEICE).

Superregenerative oscillator

Fig. 10d shows the block diagram of a WUR based on a superregenerative oscillator
(SRO), which is the core of the receiver. The receiver operates as follows. The SRO
takes a sample coming from the input signal centered at SRO’s natural oscillation
frequency. Then the SRO starts to oscillate. The start-up time of the SRO depends
on the amplitude of the sample. Thermal noise is enough to start the oscillations in
the event that there is no actual signal coming from an antenna. Therefore, a signal
modulated, e.g., with OOK can be demodulated by measuring the start-up time.
Next, the SRO is switched off with a quench signal, which operates at considerably
lower frequencies than the SRO. Then this operation starts from the beginning.
WUR designs based on the SRO proposed in [129] and [9] are designed to
demodulate OOK modulated signals. Whereas, a WUR introduced in [130] detects
FSK modulated signals by sampling each incoming bit at two different frequencies
in a row. Then the receiver compares the samples after they have been rectified that

48
reveals the received bit. The receiver’s sensitivity is -86 dBm, and the power
consumption is 215 µW.

Other receiver architectures

In addition to the architectures described above, other architectures have been

proposed to be used as well by individual works. In [131], a WUR based on
subsampling architecture is proposed in which a sample and hold circuit down-
converts the signal to IF for amplification and envelope detection. Generally,
subsampling receivers are considered to have a high noise figure (NF) [132] that
most probably is the reason why it is not utilized in WUR designs more often.
However, it is reported that the WUR in [131] achieves a sensitivity of -78 dBm at
915 MHz with a power consumption of 16 µW.
A matched filter based WUR is introduced in [133]. In order to ensure low-
power consumption, a passive surface acoustic wave matched filter is designed and
fabricated [134] which matches with an 11-chip Barker spreading coded wake-up
signal. After dispreading, the signal’s envelope is detected, followed by a decision
circuit. The receiver’s power consumption is 99 µW at 2484 MHz and its sensitivity
is -60 dBm.

3.5.2 Comparison of wake-up receivers

WUR design includes tradeoffs regarding, e.g., size, power consumption, data rate,
selectivity, and sensitivity. Typically, in the WUR research work, the main focus
has been in power consumption and sensitivity. In some work, energy per bit is also
used as a performance metric. However, WURs are not intended to receive large
amounts of data, so the receiver’s active power consumption is seen as a more
important metric than energy per bit.
Table 2 shows the main parameters and performance metrics of the SotA
WURs. As can be seen, so far the RFED has been the most popular architecture,
since it is the most straightforward option for power detection with very low-power
consumption. On the other hand, the receivers based on RFED architecture do not
achieve sensitivity levels close to what commercial WPAN transceivers have
(typically around -95 dBm). The RFED receivers feature the lowest power
consumption at the cost of sensitivity. OOK is the most popular modulation method,
but FSK has been exploited as well, especially in receivers based on injection
locking.
49
Table 2. Comparison of wake-up receivers ([23], published by permission of IEICE).

Reference Architecture Operation Modulation Sensitivity Power Data CMOS

frequency [dBm] consumption rate technology
[MHz] [µW] [kbps] [nm]
[99] RFED 868 OOK -71 2.4 200 130
[100] RFED 433 GOOK -51 0.27 5.5 Discrete
[106] RFED 2400 OOK -65 10 100 180
[107] RFED 915 OOK -41 0.10 100 130
[108] RFED 915 OOK -75 51 100 90
[109] RFED 2400 OOK -53 7.5 100 120
[110] RFED 5800 OOK -44 36 256 130
[111] RFED 60000 OOK -68 9 350 180
[112] RFED 1900 OOK -56 65 100 90
[113] RFED 405 OOK -45.5 0.12 12.5 130
[114] RFED 2450 OOK -47 2.3 200 130
[115] RFED 868 OOK -55 1.2 N/A Discrete
[116] RFED 2400 OOK -54 10 200 90
[117] RFED 50 OOK -60 0.012 1 65
[118] RFED 113.5 OOK -69 0.005 0.3 180
[119] IL 80 FSK -62 45 312 180
[120] IL 45 FSK -62.7 37.5 200 130
[121] IL 405 FSK -75 38 20 130
[122] IL 433 FSK -78 54 200 180
[123] U-IF 2000 OOK -72 52 100 90
[124] U-IF 915 OOK -70 28 N/A 90
[125] U-IF 408 OOK -55 100 50 180
[126] U-IF 2450 OOK -88 50 250 65
[127] U-IF 868 OOK -78 41 4 65
[128] U-IF 2400 OOK -97 99 10 65
[129] SRO 1900 OOK -100.5 400 5 N/A
[9] SRO 28 OOK -64 20 N/A Discrete
[130] SRO 2400 FSK -86 215 250 180
[131] Subsampling 915 OOK -78 16 10 130
[133] Matched filter 2484 OOK -60 99 N/A Discrete

Most of the receivers are operating in the ISM frequency bands, but there are also
WUR designs suitable for HBC, i.e., operating in high and very high frequency
bands (3 – 300 MHz). As for the data rate, the wake-up signal is typically
considered to be rather small – only a few bytes, so the signal can be transmitted
reasonably fast even with low data rates. Furthermore, the receiver should be small

50
Fig. 11. Comparison between SotA WURs in terms of power consumption and
sensitivity ([23], published by permission of IEICE).

in size and preferably without external components. As a result, the complementary

metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology is also given in Table 2.
In order to highlight the tradeoff between power consumption and sensitivity,
Fig. 11 shows a comparison of all the receivers presented in Table 2 with these two
performance metrics. At the moment, a power consumption of around 100 µW is
required to achieve the sensitivity level of commercial WPAN transceivers.
Nevertheless, based on this review, the general trend is that the performance is
improving at a moderate rate.

3.5.3 Summary and future research directions

It has been shown in [32, 98] that by integrating a WUR into a sensor node, this
can bring significant energy savings compared to duty cycle MAC protocol
solutions in WSNs. The energy savings and low latency have led to their
consideration for use in 5G mobile terminals [135] as well. Due to the benefits of

51
the WURs, it could be that they are an essential part of the batteryless WSNs of the
future.
Even though there are advantages to use WURs, so far they have not achieved
commercial success. The need still exists to continue research work in order to
reach wide acceptance. The SotA WURs have been designed for body area and
personal area networks. Even in those networks, WURs are struggling to achieve
the same sensitivity as commercial transceivers. The situation is even worse when
compared to LPWANs where commercial transceivers have sensitivities better than
-130 dBm [101, 102]. As a tradeoff, the data rates are low, even under 300 bps with
certain settings [102]. The justification for this is that messages are transmitted
rarely and their size is small. The same could be applied to WURs. Most of the
SotA WURs are still operating with much higher data rates, from 100 to 350 kbps.
Therefore, one option for future WUR research could be to design a receiver that
would improve sensitivity at the cost of the data rate. [28]

3.6 Controllable energy source for energy harvesting-powered

sensor nodes

Deployment of wireless sensor nodes for a large property enables the monitoring,
e.g., of indoor air quality, water pipe leakages and the condition of building frames.
Such monitoring is an important part of facility management digitalization. Not
surprisingly, a large number of sensor nodes is needed to cover a large property,
and they should be as maintenance-free as possible. Sensor nodes powered by
energy harvesting have been proposed for many years to overcome this problem.
One of the most promising sources of energy is light. Facilities such as hospitals,
universities, schools, and government buildings have a considerable amount of
artificial lighting that can be used to provide the energy needed for operation.
Nevertheless, during the nights and weekends, the lights could be turned off in
order to reduce the electricity bills. Without light, the sensor node operates as long
as there is stored energy left. Once all the stored energy on the sensor node is
depleted, the sensor node is unable to carry out the assigned task any longer.
Therefore, the research problem is how to guarantee high QoS for an application
that is dependent on passive wireless sensor nodes.
Wireless sensor nodes powered by energy harvesting is certainly an interesting
topic, at least according to the number of publications. In the IEEE digital library
alone, there are dozens of surveys available on the topic. Generic surveys typically
focus on various harvesting techniques, performance and challenges (e.g., [136–
52
139]), but there are also surveys with a narrower focus, such as wireless power
transfer (WPT) [140–142] and MAC protocols for energy harvesting [143]. Plenty
of prototypes have been introduced in the literature that harvest energy from light,
e.g., [96, 144]. Controllable energy sources have also been introduced. For example,
in [145], a self-powered piezoelectric button controller is presented, which
transmits a message when the button is pushed. The piezoelectric material converts
mechanical force to electrical potential.
Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that it is difficult to find any COTS sensor
nodes that operate solely with energy harvesting. Development kits are available,
e.g., from Cypress [146]. As it has been mentioned in many of the surveys, it is a
challenge to operate solely with energy harvesting, because in many places energy
sources are available either only part of the time or not at all. Therefore, methods
based on WPT have gained interest recently because they can be used to provide
constant energy source. The downside is that they need a wireless power transmitter,
i.e., an infrastructure for the sensor network is required for many applications.

3.6.1 Description of the proposed system

This thesis introduces a novel solution to this problem of having unreliable or

unpredictable energy sources [5]. It is proposed that when the amount of energy
available in a passive sensor node’s buffer falls below a certain threshold, it requests
a power source, such as a smart light, to switch on; thereby enabling the sensor
node to charge the energy storage by using a photovoltaic panel. Once fully charged,
the sensor node sends a notification that the lamp can be switched off. Alternatively,
the smart lamp could be set to learn when the sensor node needs recharging and
could automatically switch on without request signals.
Fig. 12 shows an example of how the system could be implemented. It consists
of four components: a passive sensor node, light controller equipped with a wireless
radio, light source, and a gateway that routes measurement and control data to a
cloud server. In the example setup, a lamp is used as the energy source, but other
sources can be used as well, e.g., energy can be transferred using WPT. In order to
ensure long service life for the sensor node with fully-charged energy storage, the
wireless communications should be implemented with low-power radio technology,
e.g., with ZigBee or BLE. The system can be used both indoors and outdoors, and
can be utilized, e.g., in various environment monitoring applications.

53
Fig. 12. QoS guaranteed environment-monitoring system with a passive wireless sensor
node ([5], published by permission of IEEE).

3.6.2 Implementation

The system depicted in Fig. 12 was implemented in collaboration with the Centre
for Wireless Communications and Helvar Oy Ab. Helvar is a specialist in
intelligent lighting solutions.
The smart light controller was equipped with a BLE v4.2 transceiver. Since it
enables low-power wireless communications, the BLE was used to implement the
communications. The sensor node and light controller do not establish a connection,
but they use modified broadcast advertisement messages. This reduces the message
exchange and therefore saves the sensor node’s energy. Another major energy-
saving feature was to disable downlink communications. Smart light and its
controller are powered from the mains, so minimizing the energy consumption is
not that critical. The gateway is implemented on a Raspberry Pi single board
computer.
The sensor node used in the implementation was the modular IoT research
platform developed at the Centre for Wireless Communications [6, 7]. It enabled
the stacking together of various hardware modules that provided the desired
functionalities. The passive sensor node built for this task is shown in Fig. 2. It
consists of a main board with TI’s CC2650 [147] system on chip (BLE and ZigBee
transceivers), a sensor module with six sensors, and a power module suitable for
harvesting energy from light. The harvested energy is boosted with the TI’s

54
Fig. 13. The sensor node’s voltage level when being charged at request ([5], published
by permission of IEEE).

BQ25570 boost charger and buck converter, and the energy is stored to a 1 mF
capacitor in the main board. The sensor node was programmed to stay in low-power
sleep mode (measured power consumption was 1.2 µW) most of the time, in order
to maximize service life. Periodically, the sensor node woke up, made a
measurement, transmitted data to the smart lamp, and then went back to sleep mode.
The operation of the implemented system was tested as follows. The sensor
node was placed on a table at a distance of one meter away from the smart light,
which was the only light source in a dim office environment. The sensor node was
set to transmit a message containing overhead, capacitor charge level (measured in
the SoC as voltage level) and temperature value every five seconds, if it has a
sufficient amount of energy. Even though the five-second interval may not be
practical for measuring temperature with a passive sensor node, this period was
used as a reference to illustrate the operation principle and performance of the
developed system.

55
 In Fig. 13, it is shown how the measured voltage level changes when it is
charged at request. After the voltage level goes below the threshold (set to 2.9 V),
the sensor node transmits a request to the smart lamp to turn on. After the voltage
level exceeds 3.2 V, the sensor node transmits a request to turn off the light. Without
communication or light blockage, the system can operate until component
malfunction or electric power blackout occurs.
With a lower threshold (2.4 V) and fully charged capacitor, the sensor node
was able to transmit around 30 broadcast packets in a dim office (i.e., no
recharging). If the period is set between transmissions to, e.g., 15 minutes, the
sensor node could operate for several hours without charging. The operation period
can be extended considerably if the sensor node is placed, e.g., close to a window.

3.6.3 Summary

Currently, most wireless sensor nodes are running on energy provided by a battery,
which means that inevitably they will run out of energy at some point. To
replace/recharge the sensor node’s battery may bring major maintenance costs.
Energy harvesting has been proposed for many years to overcome this problem.
Academia has produced thousands of papers on the topic, but it is still difficult to
find commercial sensor nodes operating solely with energy harvesting. The main
reason for this, probably, is that it is difficult to find a proper energy source for
varied locations. In this thesis, a method was proposed that allows the sensor node
to request an energy source to provide energy when needed. Energy-wise, the
proposed method changes a passive wireless device from the opportunistic mode
to proactive, which enables an application to operate in a more predictable manner.

3.7 Mobility management in wireless sensor networks

Mobility management is an essential part of worldwide cellular communications

systems. When a mobile phone is about to move away from its current serving base
station’s coverage area, a procedure called as a handover (or a handoff) is
implemented. In the handover, the mobile phone is changed from its current serving
base station to a new one. The handover can be implemented as hard or soft. In the
hard handover, the mobile phone is first disconnected from the serving base station
before being connected to the new base station. Conversely, in the soft handover
the mobile phone establishes a connection with the new base station before it
releases the previous connection. [148–150]
56
 One example of an application where the sensor nodes are mobile is asset
tracking. When the monitored goods are being transferred from one location to
another, mobility management schemes are needed to ensure connectivity
throughout the trip. Similar schemes are also needed in static WSNs where the
existing connection may be lost, which leads to topology changes. This can occur
for numerous reasons, e.g., fading or interference in the radio channel that prevents
successful signal reception. Furthermore, a sensor node can break down, it can run
out of energy, its photovoltaic panel can be blocked, or a network may suffer from
congestion.
In many applications, a resource-restricted sensor node in terms of energy and
computational power establishes a connection with a gateway (also referred to in
the mobility-related works as access point, sink, edge router or point of attachment)
that has a connection to the backbone network. In the star topology, the sensor node
is one hop away from the gateway, but in other topologies, there can be multiple
hops between the sensor node and the gateway. If the connection with the gateway
is about to get lost due to mobility or reasons listed above, the sensor node needs
to find a new gateway that can take over the necessary tasks.

3.7.1 Related work

A network-controlled mobility management scheme Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6)

is described by IETF in RFC 5213 [151]. In PMIPv6, the gateways manage
handovers and set up the routes for the sensor node while it is moving. However,
the RFC does not describe how the mobile sensor node movement is detected.
Several mobility management schemes have been proposed for resource
restricted sensor nodes [152]. The mobility scenarios can be divided into three
different types: intra, inter, and network mobility [95, 153]. In the network mobility,
a cluster of mobile devices is moving. The gateway of the cluster handles the
mobility management with the backbone and it can be, e.g., 3G, 4G, or WLAN.
Such technologies can be hardly considered as low-power, so the network mobility
is beyond the scope of this thesis. In the inter mobility, the sensor node moves
between the networks. For example, moving between 6LoWPANs, the IPv6
address changes [95, 152, 153]. The research works typically consider the last type
of mobility, i.e., the intra mobility where the sensor node moves within the WPAN.
In the context of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, the network consists of several PAN
coordinators, and the sensor node moves between them. One of the PAN

57
coordinators is the network coordinator that provides the unique identification for
the network.
In [154], it is proposed that the sensor node periodically checks the most
suitable gateway by broadcasting a request frame, and based on the received signal
strength indication (RSSI) of the responses, it selects the gateway. If the sensor
node decides to change current gateway to a new one, it performs a handover
independently without loading the network. In [155], the idea is extended by taking
into account more parameters. The handover procedure is based on RSSI, but also
on velocity, number of hops to the gateway, traffic load, and remaining energy.
Acknowledgements (ACK) for frames are used to determine the quality of the
connection (based on RSSI) between the sensor node and the gateway in the Smart-
HOP method [156, 157]. If the RSSI is less than a predefined threshold, the sensor
node transmits set of three beacons to the gateways nearby. The gateways reply
using TDMA based MAC in order to avoid collisions. The RSSI of the replies are
compared and the gateway is selected with highest RSSI.
In the handover method introduced in [158, 159], both the sensor node and the
gateway can trigger the handover procedure. In the sensor node triggered approach,
the sensor node periodically transmits renew frames to its serving gateway. If the
gateway does not reply, the sensor node starts to find a new gateway by
broadcasting route frames and waits for replies. In the gateway approach, a new
gateway transmits queries to sensor nodes that have been previously registered with
it. If the sensor node notices that the RSSI of the new gateway is better than the one
from its serving gateway, the sensor node breaks the connection with the serving
gateway and establishes a connection with the new gateway.
The handover method designed for WBANs is introduced in [160]. In the
design, three entities are involved handling the mobility: a WBAN sensor node, a
WBAN coordinator, and a gateway. The coordinator is responsible for all the
communications with the sensor nodes and the gateways. First, the coordinator
scans all 16 channels defined in IEEE 802.15.4 standard to discover the gateways
and to associate with one of them. The association decision is based on the RSSI.
Then the sensor nodes start to transmit data via the coordinator to the gateway. If
the gateway receives a frame with poor RSSI, it commands the WBAN to change
the acting coordinator to another sensor node. This may help, since in a WBAN
sensor nodes can be distributed all around the body, so some sensor nodes may have
a LoS to the gateway. If data received from all the sensor nodes have RSSI less than
the threshold, the handover is executed. Then the coordinator starts the channel
scanning again.
58
 In a wireless multihop mesh network, sensor nodes can be used to track each
other’s whereabouts. In [153], is it proposed that the tracking is based on measuring
angle of arrival (AoA) of a received signal. In order to measure the AoA, it is
assumed that the sensor nodes are equipped with an antenna array. When a sensor
node receives a frame from a neighbor sensor node with degradation in the RSSI
level, it assumes that the neighbor sensor node is moving. Based on AoA of the
received frame, the sensor node awakes a new sensor node from a direction where
the moving sensor node is going. Then the awaked sensor node and the moving
sensor node will change information about the movement and the location update
is also transmitted to the gateway.
All the proposed handover methods are more or less based on RSSI. Some
solely while the rest utilize also some other metrics as well. Therefore, the proposed
solutions may encounter issues if there are several gateways in the proximity, e.g.,
in a warehouse where forklifts are equipped with gateways and containers are
equipped with sensor nodes. The RSSI can change rapidly with the channel
conditions that may lead to unnecessary handovers.

3.7.2 Soft handover method

In this thesis, it is introduced a soft handover method for WSN (SH-WSN) [27].
The method is based on the ratio of received router advertisement (RA) frames
defined in the Internet control message protocol (ICMP) [161], or similar frames.
By following ICMP, the gateways periodically advertise their presence by
transmitting the RA frame, which need to be transmitted at the same rate between
gateways in order the SH-WSN to work. Or alternatively, the sensor node needs to
know the advertisement periods.
The SH-WSN operates as follows. Every time a sensor node receives a RA
frame from a new gateway, it replies with a registration message. By doing this, the
sensor node can be registered with one or multiple gateways. The sensor node
makes the decision independently when to deregister from a gateway based on the
ratio of received RA frames from different gateways. Since the targeted gateway
for deregistration may already be out of range, the serving gateway handles
deregistration based on the sensor node’s requests.
The soft handover method ensures connectivity for the sensor node and
unnecessary handovers are avoided. Furthermore, since the sensor node can be
connected with multiple gateways, the sensor node can choose, which of the
gateways it uses to route data, e.g., to a cloud server. For example, based on the RA
59
Fig. 14. Message exchange in the soft handover method for WSN.

frame’s RSSI, the sensor node can select the gateway that is probably closest to it.
Therefore, the SH-WSN adds diversity to the network by enabling several routes
that is an advantage if radio signal cannot reach one of the gateways.
The introduced SH-WSN was implemented on top of 6LoWPAN layer in the
Contiki operating system (OS) [162] that was running in a TelosB sensor node [163]
(TI’s CC2420 radio transceiver [164]). The functionality was tested in a full-scale
Pan-European testbed that was designed and implemented in the SENSEI project,
which was part of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme. The implemented
message exchange as the part of the testbed is shown in Fig. 14. After the sensor
node receives the RA frame, the sensor node replies with a registration message
that includes a list of all the available resources it has. The gateway replies to the
registration message with a unique identifier in the form of the uniform resource
locator (URL) address. For example, the URL could be as follows: http://gateway-
a.net:8000/0212-7600-20d6-53b4/, where gateway-a.net is the gateway’s address,
8000 is the port number and 0212-7600-20d6-53b4 is sensor node’s extended
unique identifier (EUI). After sending the URL, the gateway transmits sensor

60
node’s resource description to a server with the sensor node’s URL address. Now
the sensor node’s resources are listed in the server and can be accessed, e.g., as
http://gateway-a.net:8000/0212-7600-20d6-53b4/sensor/co2/ or http://gateway-
a.net:8000/0212-7600-20d6-53b4/actuator/led1. Similarly, the sensor node can
register to another gateway. In the deregistration process, the sensor node transmits
a delete message, including the full address, to the connected gateway, which routes
the request to the correct gateway.
The SH-WSN was initially designed for 6LoWPANs, which enabled the SH-
WSN to exploit ICMP router advertisement (RA) messages. Nevertheless, it can be
implemented to a WSN that supports other protocols as long as the gateways
periodically transmit advertisement, or similar, messages. The period between
advertisements should be chosen as based on the sensor node’s expected maximum
velocity. If the interval is too large, the sensor node may pass the area without
receiving any RA frames. On the other hand, if RAs are transmitted too frequently,
it increases the traffic in the network.
The SH-WSN method supports utilization of a WUR. The mobile sensor node
could be equipped with the WUR that would receive advertisement frames in an
energy-friendly manner and with low latency. The WURs usually have a simple
digital logic for addressing purposes, which could be used to calculate the ratio
between frames from different gateways, which introduces negligible increase to
the power consumption.

3.8 Summary

In this chapter, the need to enable wireless sensor nodes to operate solely with an
energy harvested from the environment is discussed. The sensor node can harvest
energy from many energy sources, for example from light, electromagnetic field,
temperature difference, vibration/motion, and ambient RF energy harvesting.
Currently, the energy harvested cannot be converted with 100% efficiency into
usable energy by the sensor node. In addition, energy harvesting can be an
opportunistic approach to provide energy since it could be that, e.g., outdoors, the
sensor node’s photovoltaic cell is covered with pollen, which would drastically
reduce the amount of energy harvested from light.
Two approaches are introduced that can potentially bring the batteryless sensor
nodes one step closer to being widely sold and in use. First, by integrating the
sensor node with a WUR enables operation with some microwatts and still
providing low latency. The WUR is a simple radio receiver that continuously listens
61
to the channel for wake-up signals. It has been shown in research works that, by
using the WUR, it is more energy-efficient than the commonly used duty-cycling
MAC protocol approach. The literature survey of the proposed WURs showed that
several receiver architectures have been proposed. The comparison between
architectures revealed that RFED architecture is suitable for applications where the
wireless link distance is short and the energy consumption needs to be minimized.
Other architectures consume more energy, but provide better sensitivity.
Second, since energy harvesting is opportunistic by nature in many cases, it is
proposed that the sensor node could have control over an energy source. A system
concept of the proposed method is described in necessary detail. The system is
implemented, and its performance is measured from different perspectives. The
proposed method enables passive sensor nodes to have certain guaranteed QoS. As
future work, the plan is to develop a passive sensor node with long-range
communication capabilities using some LPWAN radio technology. LPWAN
technologies have much lower data rates than BLE has, which introduces
challenges to the power harvesting and storage circuitry. Furthermore, in this
chapter it is proposed a soft handover method for mobile WSNs that supports the
WUR concept.
All research work has exploited popular standards and specifications,
excluding the WUR-related research. Therefore, overviews of the IEEE 802.15.4
standard, the BLE specifications, and the RFCs related to the 6LoWPAN were
presented.

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4 LoRa wide area network

4.1 Low-power wide area network

LPWANs have raised great interest from the industry, commercial markets, and the
academia just recently in the last two three years. The technology has existed longer
than that, but as the interest towards IoT has increased, the LPWANs have taken
root by advertising simple network architecture, low cost sensor nodes, long sensor
node service life, and long communication distances. The latter is achieved mostly
at the cost of data rate and operating at the sub GHz frequency bands. In order to
achieve the long service life, it is expected that the sensor node transmits data
infrequently, the amount of data is kept small, and downlink communications is
limited. These features have enabled to make a wide range of IoT applications
available for consumers, and not just for the industry and the academia.
Energy efficiency is a critical design metric for the LPWAN sensor nodes since
they are powered by batteries or even with energy harvesting. Wireless sensor
nodes enable IoT applications where setting up cables is expensive, difficult, or
even impossible, e.g., when the sensor node is mobile. Limited energy resources
and low data rate inevitably exclude some applications, e.g., media streaming, but
still the number of IoT applications that will benefit from using the LPWANs is
really enormous. Fig. 15 depicts few practical and potential example applications
that can be implemented using the LPWAN technologies. These include various
metering applications (e.g., electricity, gas, water, garbage, pollution, and air
quality), infrastructure monitoring (e.g., buildings, bridges, and tunnels); and the
tracking of, e.g., goods, pets, bicycles, and cars.
At present, there is an abundance of various standards, alliances, SIGs, and
proprietary solutions dedicated to provide LPWAN technologies to the massive
global markets. Standards include, e.g., the Smart Utility Networks (SUN) and the
Low Energy Critical Infrastructure Monitoring (LECIM) PHYs defined in IEEE
802.15.4-2015 [83], the ETSI Standard GS LTN 003 [165], and the 3GPP’s
Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) [166], Long Term Evolution for Machine-Type
Communications (LTE-M) [166], and Extended Coverage Global System for
Mobile Communications (EC-GSM) [166]. Alliances and SIGs are LoRaWAN,
DASH7, Weightless, and Wireless Smart Ubiquitous Network (Wi-SUN).
Proprietary solutions are provided at least by Sigfox, Ingenu, Nwave, Telensa, and

63
Fig. 15. Possible LPWAN applications using LoRaWAN architecture as an example ([2],
published by permission of SAGE publishing).

WAViot. Different LPWAN technologies are presented briefly next, and they are
compared in Table 3. In this chapter, the LoRaWAN is evaluated in terms of
Doppler robustness and coverage; therefore, it is introduced in more detail in
Section 4.2. LoRaWAN was chosen because sensor nodes, gateways, the
LoRaWAN specification, and some application notes were easily available, unlike
from other LPWAN technologies.

LTE-M

In June 2016, the 3GPP release 13 was released that includes specifications for
LTE-M (LTE Cat M1), NB-IoT (LTE Cat NB1), and EC-GSM [166]. LTE-M and
EC-GSM have a major advantage compared to the other LPWAN technologies;
they are backward compatible with existing LTE and Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM) technologies, respectively [167].
LTE-M is capable of serving high-end IoT applications by providing reliable,
low latency, and high throughput communications. To deliver higher throughput

64
than other LPWAN technologies, it uses a bandwidth of 1.4 MHz. LTE-M also
supports voice and handovers. [167]

Narrowband IoT

NB-IoT is evolved from the GSM/EDGE Radio Access Network (GERAN)

technical support group’s work. Even though NB-IoT is part of the 3GPP release
13, it is not backward compatible with LTE [168]. However, with a software update
existing base stations can be used to provide network access. The main
requirements for NB-IoT were to improve battery service life, have a support for
large amount of devices, and to increase the coverage in order to support many IoT
applications where sensor nodes are, e.g., in hard to get places. As a result, NB-IoT
as a technology is significantly simpler than, e.g., LTE. For example, it does not
have support for voice or handovers [169]. NB-IoT can operate in the licensed LTE
in-bands and their guard-bands, and can replace a GSM carrier in a so-called
standalone configuration [170, 171].

Extended Coverage Global System for Mobile Communications

The existing GSM network is by far the most widely spread cellular network in the
world. Therefore, by designing EC-GSM to be backward compatible with it, almost
worldwide coverage is achieved immediately. To reach the goals of, e.g., increased
coverage, improved security, and longer device service life, changes are needed to
the current GSM technology. EC-GSM is designed to have as much commonality
as possible with the existing network. As a result, there is no need to make hardware
changes to the existing base stations. Software updates are required but the costs
are minimal compared to hardware changes. [167]

DASH7

DASH7 Alliance released the latest protocol specification version 1.1 early 2017,
and it originates from the ISO 18000-7 standard. The specification defines layers
from PHY all the way to the application layer. [172] The DASH7 can be considered
as mid-range communications technology, since it provides a range of a few
kilometers.

65
Weightless

Weightless SIG has three open standards for different cases of use: the Weightless-
N, Weightless-P, and Weightless-W. The Weightless-N standard is the simplest. It
is claimed that it provides over ten-years of service life and a range of over five
kilometers. Nevertheless, it supports a limited number of features, e.g., only uplink
communications are possible. The Weightless-P and Weightless-W standards
support more features, such as downlink communications. [173]

Wi-SUN

The Wi-SUN alliance’s technology utilizes the three SUN PHY options defined in
IEEE 802.15.4-2015 [174]: FSK, OFDM, and O-QPSK. The communications
range is in the order of one kilometer, which is less than in other LPWAN
technologies presented here. However, the Wi-SUN Alliance member’s proprietary
solutions usually support mesh that extends the coverage without deploying a dense
network of base stations [175].

Sigfox

Sigfox is an LPWAN technology and network service provider. It has already

deployed a dedicated network infrastructure to 45 countries worldwide. Sigfox
compliant sensor nodes transmit messages using ultra narrowband (UNB) with D-
BPSK modulation. One bit is sent per second per Hertz, and in the European Union
each message is a mere 100 Hz wide, equaling a data rate of 100 bps. Due to the
spectrum regulations, a message size is restricted to 26 bytes including overhead
(14 bytes), and a maximum of 140 messages can be transferred per day. [176]

Ingenu

Ingenu’s proprietary random phase multiple access (RPMA) technology uses the
2.4 GHz band instead of sub GHz bands mostly used by other LPWAN technologies.
Even though the higher frequency band is used, it is claimed that a range of over
ten kilometers is achieved by utilizing high transmission power, sensitive receivers,
and antennas that provide high gain. RPMA sensor nodes randomly delay
transmission from the beginning of a slot. By adding the propagation time required

66
for a frame to the random delay, it is expected that an almost unique value will be
created that can be separated from simultaneous overlapping signals. [177]

Table 3. Comparison of the LPWAN technologies.

LPWAN Based on Band (EU) Modulation Uplink data rate Range with
technology [MHz] (uplink) [kbps] min. data
rate [km]
NB-IoT 3GPP rel. 13 LTE BPSK/QPSK 20-250 > 10
LTE-M 3GPP rel. 13 LTE 16QAM 1000 < 10
EC-GSM 3GPP rel. 13 GSM GMSK/8PSK 0.5-240 > 10
LoRaWAN LoRaWAN spec. 433/868 LoRa/FSK 0.3-50 > 10
DASH7 DASH7 protocol 433/868 GFSK 9.6-167 <2
Weightless-N Weightless Std. 868 D-BPSK 0.1 <5
Sigfox Proprietary UNB 868 D-BPSK 0.1 > 10
Wi-SUN 802.15.4-2015 868 FSK/OFDM 50-1000 <1
Ingenu Proprietary RPMA 2400 RPMA-DSSS 78 > 10

4.2 Overview of LoRa technology

The LoRa Alliance was officially established in 2015, and during the same year,
the first version of the LoRaWAN specification was released. The specification
defines the communication protocols and the network architecture [178].
Consequently, the PHY is not defined in the specification, but typically two
modulation options are considered to be used with LoRaWAN: LoRa and FSK.

4.2.1 Network architecture

The LoRaWAN networks are typically deployed in a star-of-stars topology, where

gateways relay data from a sensor node to a network server, as depicted in Fig. 15.
An application server then feeds application data from the network server. The link
between the sensor node and the gateway is wireless, while the gateway can be
connected to the IP-based backbone either with a cable or wirelessly. The
application payload is encoded at the sensor node using the Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES) with a 128-bit key length. [178]
Messages transmitted by the LoRaWAN sensor nodes can be received by
multiple gateways within its communications range. Therefore, there is no need to
have specific handover methods, thereby eliminating the handover-related
signaling. The network server is responsible for redundant message filtering. It is

67
also responsible for acknowledgements and data rate optimization. The data rate is
optimized with an optional adaptive data rate (ADR) feature. If the ADR is enabled,
the network server decides the data rate for the sensor node. For example, if the
network server notices that the frame’s RSSI is strong, it can send a command to
the sensor node to use a higher data rate, which improves the energy efficiency of
the sensor node and reduces the probability of collisions. If the ADR is not enabled,
the sensor node uses the predefined configurations, even if it could benefit from
changing them. [179]

4.2.2 Physical layer

In Europe, the LoRaWAN can operate in the 433 and 868 MHz ISM bands. License
free bands are also used in other parts of the world. For example, in the United
States and in China, the 915 and 783 MHz ISM bands are used, respectively. [180]
The implications of using unlicensed ISM bands is that there can be numerous
individual radio technologies operating on the same band, and the number of
devices can be high. Therefore, the service quality can deteriorate. Another
significant implication in the sub GHz bands is the requirement to use the listen-
before-talk (LBT) method before transmitting, or the device must follow strict
duty-cycle limitations.
As mentioned, typically LoRa or FSK modulation methods are considered for
use with the LoRaWAN. LoRa is a proprietary modulation method developed by
Semtech and is based on the chirp spread spectrum (CSS). In CSS, a signal is
generated where the frequency continuously increases or decreases linearly. This
signal is referred to as chirp. The bandwidth that the chirp covers is equivalent to
the signal’s spectral bandwidth. [181]
The bit rate for LoRa modulation can be calculated as [181]

= × , (2)

where SF is the spreading factor, CR is the code rate, and BW is the bandwidth. The
bandwidth in the EU can be 125 or 250 kHz, and the code rate is commonly fixed
to 4/5. The spreading factor defines how many bits are encoded per symbol. Table
4 shows the supported data rates (calculated using (2)).
For each transmission, the sensor node selects a channel in a pseudo-random
manner from the defined channel list. The benefit is the obtained frequency
diversity that makes the system more robust against interferences. It also allows

68
transmitting more frequently since the ISM bands have quite strict spectrum access
regulations (discussed more in Section 4.3). [180]

Table 4. Different data rate options for the LoRa and FSK modulations ([3], published by
permission of SAGE publishing).
Modulation Spreading factor Bandwidth Bit rate Receiver sensitivity
[102]
LoRa 12 125 kHz 0.293 kbps -137 dBm
LoRa 11 125 kHz 0.537 kbps -134.5 dBm
LoRa 10 125 kHz 0.976 kbps -132 dBm
LoRa 9 125 kHz 1.757 kbps -129 dBm
LoRa 8 125 kHz 3.125 kbps -126 dBm
LoRa 7 125 kHz 5.468 kbps -124 dBm
LoRa 7 250 kHz 10.936 kbps -122 dBm
FSK - 150 kHz 50 kbps -122 dBm

4.2.3 Medium access control

The LoRaWAN specification [180] defines three options for the MAC layer that
are called as class A, B, and C. Class A is obligatory for all sensor nodes while
classes B and C are optional. When a sensor node is operating in the class A, it can
start transmitting a frame in the pure ALOHA protocol [182] fashion at any moment
of time. After the frame is transmitted, the sensor node opens two receive windows
in the same channel that can be used, e.g., for acknowledgement, or to command
the sensor node to switch to a different data rate. In class B, the sensor nodes are
allocated with more receive windows at fixed time intervals. This is achieved by
sending a beacon periodically from a gateway that synchronizes all the sensor
nodes. The sensor nodes implementing class C continuously listen to the channel
(unless they are transmitting), which minimizes the latency for downlink
communications. Therefore, the sensor nodes in class C should have sufficient
power available.

4.3 Performance evaluation of LoRa technology

At the beginning of the year 2015, there was a lack of research publications related
to LoRa technology. For the most part, all the material the author was able to find
was produced by Semtech or LoRa Alliance. Media hype around LoRaWAN and
other LPWAN technologies was increasing at a rapid rate. For this reason, there

69
was also a need for outsiders to start evaluating the technology. In this section, the
performance of LoRa technology is evaluated in terms of Doppler robustness [2]
and coverage under both outdoors [25] and indoors [3, 26] conditions. Furthermore,
the results from outdoor coverage measurements were used to create a channel
attenuation model [25].
The practical measurements were conducted with LoRaWAN compliant COTS
sensor nodes and a gateway. The Semtech’s LoRaMote [183] was used as the sensor
node, which is equipped with a Semtech SX1272 transceiver [102] connected to a
planar inverted-F antenna. The LoRaMote also has a set of sensors and a global
positioning system (GPS) signal receiver. The sensor nodes were programmed to
report measured sensor data and GPS coordinates to the gateway, which forwarded
them to the network server. Each message contained a sequence number that
enabled calculation of the packet error rate (PER). Acknowledgements and
retransmissions were not used in the measurements. As for the MAC layer, Class A
was used, so no synchronization nor carrier sensing were used. For the
measurements, one gateway was deployed at the premises of the Faculty of
Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), University of Oulu,
Finland. The gateway was connected to an Aerial’s biconical antenna D100-1000
[184]. The antenna is placed at the antenna tower as shown in Fig. 16, at a height
of approximately 24 m from ground level. The sensor nodes and the gateway were
configured to use six frequency channels from the 868 MHz ISM band. One of the
channels (i.e., 869.400–869.650 MHz) allows the use of transmission power of 27
dBm (500 mW); but in other channels, the maximum transmit power is 14 dBm (25
mW), which was then used throughout the measurements. The frequency
regulations [185] define the duty cycle (device-specific active time of a period,
usually given in percentages) for spectrum access in the utilized ISM band. Table
5 shows the duty cycle and the maximum effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP)
for the channels used. The restricted spectrum access and long transmission times
made measurement campaigns very time-consuming. Each sensor node calculates
its own on-air time for each channel and follows the imposed restrictions. Even
though the sensor node was configured to transmit a frame periodically every five
seconds, it actually transmitted a frame every 12 s on average.
The ADR feature was not used in any of the measurements. There were two
reasons for this. First, in most of the measurements the sensor node was mobile. In
[178] it is noted that mobile sensor nodes should use a fixed data rate, since
mobility can cause temporal variations for the radio channel characteristics.

70
Fig. 16. The D100-1000 antenna is mounted to the University of Oulu antenna tower, a
height of 24 m from ground level ([3], published by permission of Springer).

Moreover, it enabled obtaining the required measurement data with varying

configurations.

Table 5. Frequency regulations for the utilized ISM band ([25], published by permission
of IEEE).

fc [MHz] Maximum EIRP [185] Spectrum access [185]

868.100 14 dBm 1% or LBT AFA1

868.300 14 dBm 1% or LBT AFA
868.500 14 dBm 1% or LBT AFA
868.850 14 dBm 0.1% or LBT AFA
869.050 14 dBm 0.1% or LBT AFA
869.525 27 dBm 10% or LBT AFA
1
Listen before talk adaptive frequency agility (LBT AFA)

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Fig. 17. The LoRaWAN sensor node mounted to the roof rack of a car ([2], published by
permission of SAGE publishing).

4.3.1 Outdoor coverage

Setup

The outdoor coverage was measured during the spring and summer of 2015 in
collaboration with Nokia [25]. The population of Oulu at the time was almost
200 000, and the highest residential buildings were 12 floors high. The Oulu region
is mainly flat, i.e., there are no large differences in geographical elevation. Oulu is
located close to the seashore of the Gulf of Bothnia, with many harbors for leisure
boaters and commercial freight. Therefore, some of the measurements were
conducted at sea.
On land, the measurements were conducted by mounting a sensor node
approximately 2 m above the ground on the roof rack of a car, as shown in Fig. 17.
The car was driven along the major roads naturally following the speed limits
(between 40 km/h and 100 km/h). In the measurements at sea, the sensor node was
mounted to a radio mast of a boat, as shown in Fig. 18. The boat speed was around

72
Fig. 18. The LoRaWAN sensor node mounted to the mast of a boat during the
measurements at sea ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

five knots (~9 km/h). The starting point for the boat was in the harbor, located at
5.1 kilometer southwest from the gateway.
The sensor node was configured to use SF = 12, which gives the best coverage,
since the receiver can detect the lowest signal level compared to other spreading
factors (shown in Table 4).

Results

Fig. 19 shows a heat map of a radio signal laid on a satellite image of the Oulu
region. The heat map is based on the RSSI received by the gateway. It was made
using the Google Maps JavaScript application programming interface (API) [186].
The gateway is used as the center point for the five circles that divide the area in
five zones: 0-2 km, 2-5 km, 5-10 km, 10-15 km, and 15-30 km. The heat map shows
that within a two-kilometer range, the RSSI value is mostly better than -110 dBm,
which means that there is still plenty of link budget left to capture a packet correctly

73
(see Table 4). Nonetheless, 12% of the packets were lost as shown in Table 6.
Between a two- and five-kilometer range, the PER does not increase considerably,
and 85% of the transmitted frames were received. In the next zone, one-third of the
packets were lost. Within the range of 10 and 15 km, considerably more packets
were lost than received.
Table 7 shows results from the measurements at sea and they showed that a
longer range is achievable. The maximum distance where the packet was received
was 29.4 km from the gateway towards the sea.

Table 6. Results of measurements at land ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

Range Number of transmitted packets Number of received packets Packet loss ratio

0-2 km 894 788 12%

2-5 km 1215 1030 15%
5-10 km 3898 2625 33%
10-15 km 932 238 74%

Table 7. Results of measurements at sea ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

Range Number of transmitted packets Number of received packets Packet loss ratio

5-15 km 2998 2076 31%

15-30 km 690 430 38%

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Fig. 19. The heat map of the RSSI from various locations in Oulu, Finland ([2], published
by permission of SAGE publishing).

75
4.3.2 Channel attenuation model

The outdoor coverage measurement results were also used to build a channel
attenuation model for estimating, e.g., the communication distance for LoRa
technology in the areas similar to Oulu [25]. In the measurements, the sensor node
hopped between six frequency channels. Channels are listed in Table 5 where it can
be seen that all channels are within 1.55 MHz band. Furthermore, taken into
account the limited amount of data, the attenuation model was made for the mean
frequency, i.e., 868.72 MHz.
First, the path loss was calculated with a conventional link budget equation
from the measurement results. Then the linear polynomial fit was used to derive
the expected path loss (EPL) from the data by utilizing the logarithmic link distance.
The EPL is calculated as [187]
= + 10 log / (3)
where B is the path loss intercept, n is the path loss exponent, d is the distance
between the sensor node and the gateway, and d0 is the reference distance. Since
the coverage area is large, the reference distance was set to 1 km.
Figures 20 and 21 show the expected path losses at land and at sea, respectively.
The measured path loss values are marked with black dots, and for reference, the
free space path loss (FSPL) is shown with a dashed blue line. Note that the
presented results are gathered only from uplink communications. As can be seen,
the expected path loss in both cases with all the distances is considerably higher
than free space path loss. However, it is hardly surprising, since FSPL predicts the
signal attenuation in a case where a transmitter and a receiver have unobstructed
LoS between them [188]. The measured path loss values have scattered over a wide
range at several different distances. The shadow fading shows a deviation between
the measured path loss and expected path loss, and it is calculated as [188]
σSF = σ − (4)
where σ is the standard deviation and PL is the measured path loss. Table 8 shows
the calculated shadow fading, path loss exponent, and path loss intercept in both
cases. Reflections from the sea explain the low path loss exponent value. The
shadow fading values are in the same range as in other empirical measurements on
the sub-GHz band [189].

76
Fig. 20. Measured and expected path losses derived from measurements at land,
compared to the free space path loss ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

Table 8. Channel characteristics ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

Measurement scenario
Metric Free space
At land At sea
Path loss exponent (n) 2.32 1.76 2.00
Path loss intercept (B) 128.95 126.43 91.22
Shadow fading (σSF) 7.8 dB 8.0 dB -

77
Fig. 21. Measured and expected path losses derived from measurements at sea,
compared to the free space path loss ([25], published by permission of IEEE).

4.3.3 Resistance against Doppler effect

It is well-known that when a source of a wave is moving relative to an observer,

the observer receives a frequency which differs from the one radiated. This
phenomenon is referred to as the Doppler effect. The difference in the frequency
depends on the movement velocity and direction of the source. When it comes to
wireless communications, the Doppler effect may cause fast fading that leads to
signal distortion, which hinders the correct reception of the signal [188]. Fast fading
occurs if the symbol time (Ts) is larger than the coherence time (Tc). During the
coherence time, the channel is regarded as unvarying. The coherence time is
calculated as [188]

= , (5)
D

78
where ωD is the angular frequency shift caused by the Doppler effect. The symbol
time for LoRa modulation is calculated as [181]

= , (6)

where SF is the spreading factor and BW is the bandwidth.

By comparing the coherence time at various velocities and symbol times with
different configurations, it is possible to see whether fast fading occurs – and if it
does, at what velocities. Fig. 22 shows the coherence time at 868 MHz at various
velocities, along with LoRa symbol times having varying spreading factors and
bandwidths [2]. When the velocity is less than 38 km/h, the coherence time is
always larger than the symbol time. At 38 km/h, the coherence time and symbol
time with SF = 12 curves cross. For SF = 11, the curves cross at 76 km/h. Therefore,
signal undergoes fast fading at relatively low velocities with these spreading factors.
Signal with spreading factors from seven to ten tolerate higher velocities.
Empirical measurements were performed to see the correlation between
theoretical results and results obtained using the COTS LoRaWAN devices.
Specifically, the performance was measured using SF = 12, because it is still
feasible to do measurements at velocities where the symbol time exceeds the
coherence time. The impact of the Doppler effect to the performance is measured
with two mobile scenarios. In the first scenario, a sensor node was mounted to a
lathe, which was used to generate different angular velocities. In the second
scenario, the sensor node was mounted to a car that was driven along a motorway
passing the gateway.

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Fig. 22. Comparison between LoRaWAN symbol times and coherence time at different
velocities ([2], published by permission of SAGE publishing).

Angular velocity measurements

The lathe was located at the University of Oulu workshop at a distance of

approximately 75 meters from the gateway. From the radio signal propagation point
of view, the workshop was sufficiently challenging, due to the presence of
numerous metalwork machines, the mesh nets attached to the ceiling, and the
concrete walls. The sensor node was mounted to a plywood disc that was fastened
to the lathe as shown in Fig. 23. In order to make the installation stable, a
counterweight was also mounted to the disk opposite to the sensor node. When the
lathe was turned on, the sensor node moved along a circular path with an angular
velocity of
×
ω= , (7)

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Fig. 23. The angular velocity measurement setup ([2], published by permission of SAGE
publishing).

where RPM stands for rounds per minute, which is the rotation velocity generated
by the lathe. The angular velocity can be converted to linear velocity by multiplying
the angular velocity with the radius. The radius measured from the sensor node’s
antenna to the lathe’s rotation axis was 14 cm. Table 9 shows the RPM values used
in the measurements and the respective angular and linear velocities. It also shows
the distance that the sensor node travels during a single symbol (with SF = 12 and
BW = 125 kHz) and its ratio to circumference. With the highest RPM value of 1500,
the sensor node travels 0.72 m, i.e., 82% of the circumference. Thus, the sensor
node does not make a full turn during a symbol time. Consequently, with an RPM
value of 1500, two scenarios can take place. First, the sensor node moves toward
the gateway until it reaches the closest point and then starts to move away from the
gateway. This first scenario somewhat correlates with a case when a moving object
passes by the gateway. In the second scenario, the sensor node moves towards the
furthest point from the gateway and then starts approaching the gateway. This
scenario can occur when the sensor node is mounted into a tire of a car or shaft:
something not considered a typical application for LoRaWAN, but still plausible.
With lower RPM values, simpler scenarios can occur, e.g., the sensor node is able
to transmit a symbol while travelling towards the gateway.

81
 It is obvious that the antenna’s radiation pattern with respect to the gateway
changed constantly when the lathe was turned on, since the used antenna was
omnidirectional in one plane [190]. Therefore, there was a need to conduct a series
of reference measurements with static placement of the sensor node at different
angles with regard to the ground. The angles used were 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°.
Fig. 23 shows the sensor node at 180°. Table 10 shows the packet success ratio of
the reference measurements. It can be noted that the performance at varying angles
is quite similar.

Table 9. Different velocities used in the measurements ([2], published by permission of

SAGE publishing).

Travelled distance ds to circumference

RPM Angular velocity Linear velocity
within Ts (ds) ratio

500 52.36 rad/s 7.36 m/s (26.49 km/h) 0.24 m 27.3%

750 78.54 rad/s 11.00 m/s (39.60 km/h) 0.36 m 40.9%

1000 104.72 rad/s 14.67 m/s (52.78 km/h) 0.48 m 54.6%

1250 130.90 rad/s 18.33 m/s (65.99 km/h) 0.60 m 68.0%
1500 157.08 rad/s 21.99 m/s (79.16 km/h) 0.72 m 82.0 %

Table 10. Reference measurement results for angular velocity measurements ([2],
published by permission of SAGE publishing).

Number of transmitted Number of received Average received

Angle Success ratio
packets packets signal strength

0° 386 376 97.4% -82.4 dBm

90° 322 316 98.1% -78.7 dBm
180° 377 367 97.4% -77.2 dBm
270° 325 316 97.2% -79.5 dBm
Total 1410 1375 97.5% -79.1 dBm

After the reference measurements, the lathe was turned on at various RPM values.
For each RPM value, the sensor node transmitted around 900 frames. Table 11
shows the results of the measurements. The communications reliability decreases
significantly at RPM = 750 where the success ratio is only 51%. At higher RPM
values, around one-third of the packets was received correctly. The average RSSI is
mostly worse compared to the reference measurements, but still the signal power
level is excellent, i.e., there is plenty of link budget left.

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Fig. 24. Packet success ratio with varying RPM values ([2], published by permission of
SAGE publishing).

Fig. 24 shows an illustrative graph of the results with a comparison between

coherence time and symbol time. As expected, the reliability drops after symbol
time exceeds coherence time. Fig. 24 also shows that with RPM values of 1250 and
1500, the success ratio is better than with RPM of 1000. There are several potential
explanations for this. First, the number of transmitted frames is low. Second, since
the LoRa sensor node is operating in the unlicensed ISM band, there may have been
interference from other wireless systems. Third, variations in the environment, i.e.,
the path between the sensor node and the gateway could not be controlled. Fourth,
with these RPM values, the coherence time does not decrease as rapidly anymore,
as can be seen in Fig. 22.

83
Table 11. Angular velocity measurement results ([2], published by permission of SAGE
publishing).

RPM Number of transmitted Number of received Success ratio Average received

packets packets signal strength

500 896 751 84% -83.1 dBm

750 890 455 51% -84.9 dBm
1000 904 261 29% -87.3 dBm
1250 915 313 34% -86.4 dBm
1500 918 272 30% -87.8 dBm

Linear velocity measurements

To the west of the University of Oulu, a motorway passes by less than one kilometer
away from the gateway, enabling the performance of linear velocity measurements.
The sensor node was mounted on a dashboard of a car. The car was driven back
and forth along the motorway where the speed limit is 100 km/h. Fig. 25 shows a
map of the area that illustrates the position of the gateway (point B) and the part of
the motorway (between points A and C) used in the measurements. At road junction
points D and E, the car was turned around. The reference measurements in the
absence of Doppler effect were conducted at points 1-4, because it is illegal to park
the car on the motorway. The reference measurement points were selected to be as
close to the motorway as possible.
The motorway does not pass by the gateway in a direct angle, which affects to
the instantaneous frequency observed by the gateway as
×
= , (8)

where fc is the center frequency of the transmitted frame, c is the wave speed, vsn is
the velocity of the car (and the sensor node) and α is the angle between direction
towards the gateway and the direction of car’s movement. Therefore, the shift in
the frequency due to the Doppler effect is smaller compared to a scenario where
the car would be travelling straight towards the gateway. However, coherence time
is still larger than symbol time (SF = 12, BW = 125 kHz).

84
Fig. 25. The section of the motorway that was used in Doppler measurements ([2],
published by permission of SAGE publishing).

85
Table 12 shows the results of the measurements. Frames transmitted from the
reference points were delivered with a success ratio of over 97%. When the car was
moving at 100 km/h, less than one-third of the packets were received correctly. The
result is in line with the angular velocity measurement results. The received packets
were distributed sufficiently evenly over the motorway. Therefore, there was no
area with signal blockage, which could have explained part of the lost packets
beside the Doppler effect.

Table 12. Linear velocity measurement results with reference points ([2], published by
permission of SAGE publishing).

Distance between the Number of

Velocity of the Number of
sensor node and the transmitted Success ratio
car received packets
gateway packets
1.7 km (ref. point 1) 0 km/h 812 788 97.0%
0.95 km (ref. point 2) 0 km/h 691 682 98.7%
1.5 km (ref. point 3) 0 km/h 732 724 98.9%
2.2 km (ref. point 4) 0 km/h 784 763 97.3%
0.93 km-2.4 km 100 km/h 928 260 28.0%

4.3.4 Indoor coverage

The indoor coverage measurements were done in two phases. Both measurement
campaigns were conducted at the Linnanmaa campus of University of Oulu,
Finland. The campus is approximately 320 m from east to west and 570 m from
north to south and, includes several buildings that are interconnected by indoor
passageways. The frames of the buildings are mostly made of concrete and steel.

Remote health and wellbeing monitoring

In the first measurement phase [26], a LoRaWAN sensor node was fastened to a
researcher’s arm as shown in Fig. 26 to monitor health and wellbeing remotely that
is one potential application for LoRa technology. The sensor node was configured
with the same settings as previous measurements (SF = 12, BW = 125 kHz, transmit
power = 14 dBm). A plastic sheet was mounted between the sensor node’s antenna
and a shirt to prevent them to touch each other that could worsen the performance
of the antenna.

86
Fig. 26. The sensor node attached to a research’s arm with a band in the measurement
phase 1 ([3], published by permission of Springer).

The measurements were conducted while the researcher followed his daily routine.
A typical day consisted mostly of working in an office, having discussions in
meeting rooms, and having lunch and coffee breaks. The researcher moved between
different locations by walking with a typical walking speed of 5 km/h (1.4 m/s).
The measurement locations and the walking route that were accounted for are
shown in Fig. 27.
The results of the first indoor coverage measurement campaign are shown in
Table 13. The results show that the PER is between 0.6% and 5.3%, and the average
is 3.4%. The gateway measures the RSSI for each packet, enabling the calculation
of the path loss. The average path loss and standard deviation for each location are
shown in Table 14.

87
Fig. 27. Selected measurement locations from the University of Oulu in the first phase
of indoor coverage measurements ([26], published by permission of IEEE).

Table 13. Packet error rate from different locations ([26], published by permission of
IEEE).

Distance to the Number of Number of Packet

Location
gateway’s antenna transmitted packets received packets error rate

Office (4th floor) 65 ± 5 m 1796 1758 2.1%

Bathroom (4th floor) 54 ± 2 m 331 329 0.6%
Coffee room (4th floor) 52 ± 5 m 736 717 2.6%
Main restaurant
180 ± 30 m 1245 1193 4.2%
(below street level)
Main library (1st floor) 390 ± 30 m 878 831 5.3%
Guild room (below
195 ± 15 m 340 322 5.3%
street level)
From the office to the
75–150 m 437 415 5.0%
main restaurant

88
Table 14. Path loss and standard deviation from different locations ([26], published by
permission of IEEE).

Location Average path loss σ

Office (4th floor) 97.8 dB 8.40 dB

Bathroom (4th floor) 97.2 dB 7.80 dB
Coffee room (4th floor) 100.4 dB 6.36 dB
Main restaurant (below street level) 109.1 dB 10.51 dB
Main library (1st floor) 133.7 dB 8.58 dB
Guild room (below street level) 146.1 dB 4.95 dB

Real estate remote monitoring

One LoRaWAN gateway provided the coverage for all the selected measurement
locations at the University of Oulu as shown in Table 13 when the sensor node used
the highest spreading factor. Since the use of the highest spreading factor is not the
most energy efficient option, the measurement campaign was extended in phase 2
with lower spreading factors and more locations [3]. In total, 23 individual
measurement locations were selected from all around the University of Oulu. In
phase 2, the sensor node was powered by a laptop connected with a universal serial
bus cable.
With SF = 7 and BW = 125 kHz, the campus was not fully covered anymore.
Fig. 28 shows the RSSI as a 3D radio signal heat map that was created with Google
Maps JavaScript API. The network run out of link budget at the north part (top side
of Fig. 28). In addition, at the west side of the campus, the RSSI values are very
close to the gateway’s sensitivity level with this configuration (-124 dBm, see Table
4). Furthermore, Fig. 28 reveals that the distance is not the only factor affecting the
RSSI. For example, at the central part of the campus (northwest from the gateway),
some points that are closer to the gateway showed higher attenuation than certain
points further away.
All the measurement locations were indoors. The signal levels shown in Fig.
28 outside the campus are added by the software used to create the figure and are
therefore only illustrative.
The bandwidth was subsequently increased to 250 kHz and the measurements
were repeated at the same locations. Following that, the spreading factor was
changed between values of 8, 9, and 10 with 125 kHz bandwidth configuration.

89
Fig. 28. 3D heat map of the RSSI with SF = 7 and BW = 125 kHz ([3], published by
permission of Springer).

With each configuration, around 500-600 frames were transmitted from each
location. The total number of transmitted frames was approximately 55,000.
Table 15 shows the results from 12 selected locations distributed between 55
m and 370 m distance from the gateway. It was only with SF = 7 and BW = 125
kHz that the 370 m distance was not reached. With the same spreading factor but
with a 250 kHz bandwidth, more than 60% of the packets were received from the

90
same distance. This is unexpected, because with BW = 250 kHz, the link budget
should be worse than with 125 kHz, due to higher thermal noise power.
Not surprisingly, most of the packet losses occurred at the edge of radio
sensitivity levels. The PER was below 5% at short distances where the signal levels
were better than -100 dBm. The results also show that the communications
reliability varies significantly for the different spreading factors from the same
location. For example, at the distance of 215 m and with BW = 125 kHz, the PER
is 25.7%, 63.4%, 12.3%, and 23.3% for SF = 7, 8, 9, and 10, respectively. There
are multiple options what may have caused this behavior. First, the total number of
transmitted frames per location was relatively small. Second, the environment may
have changed since the measurements with various configurations were performed
on different dates and times. Third, the RSSI is close to the sensitivity level of the
receiver.
Measurement data also revealed that packets were not lost in the burst. The
number of packets lost in a row was slightly above one on average.

Table 15. Average PER and RSSI results from indoor measurements ([3], published by
permission of Springer).

d [m] SF = 7 SF = 8 SF = 9 SF = 10
BW = 125 kHz BW = 250 kHz BW = 125 kHz BW = 125 kHz BW = 125 kHz
PER RSSI PER RSSI PER RSSI PER RSSI PER RSSI
[%] [dBm] [%] [dBm] [%] [dBm] [%] [dBm] [%] [dBm]
55 2.9 -89 2.6 -85 6.0 -87 0.9 -87 2.5 -96
65 1.0 -83 3.0 -87 1.1 -80 2.3 -89 9.0 -105
95 1.7 -79 2.5 -83 0.7 -81 8.1 -95 1.2 -89
165 2.4 -91 40.6 -119 7.7 -101 9.5 -100 6.8 -98
180 21.1 -117 27.3 -119 5.4 -101 14.3 -115 4.4 -110
195 3.8 -98 13.7 -109 7.3 -100 7.1 -102 1.9 -104
205 7.4 -109 57.2 -122 20.7 -121 8.4 -106 2.5 -99
215 25.7 -122 79.0 -124 63.4 -128 12.3 -122 23.3 -126
230 5.1 -107 15.9 -111 3.8 -99 13.0 -119 1.9 -95
305 13.7 -118 32.0 -118 15.5 -120 69.2 -132 72 -129
310 12.6 -114 19.7 -112 7.7 -107 17.4 -110 67 -119
370 No connection 35.1 -118 17.8 -115 19.6 -114 36 -122

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4.4 Summary

LPWANs enable very energy- and cost-efficient monitoring solutions for many IoT
application domains, e.g., from infrastructure monitoring to smart traffic and home
automation. Most of the LPWAN technologies utilize star topology and yet are able
to provide large coverage areas. It makes deployment of sensor nodes very simple
and fast even for people without engineering background.
LPWAN technologies are based on many different technical solutions ranging
from proprietary UNB, CSS and RPMA to LTE evolvements and IEEE 802.15.4-
2013 standard-based PHYs. Performance values vary between different
technologies, but in general, all of them support long communications range with
limited data rate. LoRaWAN is no exception. The link budget is over 150 dB, which
is enough to have a communications distance of over 10 km and a data rate in the
order of kilobits per second or even less.
In this chapter, a performance evaluation of the LoRa technology in terms of
Doppler robustness and coverage in outdoors and indoors was presented. It was
shown that, according to the theory related to the LoRa modulation, the LoRa
sensor nodes should handle mobility well with spreading factors between 7 and 10.
With spreading factors of 11 and 12, the coherence time is less than the symbol
time in relatively slow velocities, which leads to fast fading. Practical
measurements were conducted with SF = 12 to confirm this with two different
setups. The outdoor coverage measurement results showed almost 30 km range at
sea. At land, the coverage is also impressive exceeding 15 km. The reliability may
be better than that reported in this thesis, since the sensor node was mounted to a
car that added packet loss also due to the Doppler effect. The indoor coverage
measurement results showed that the LoRa technology provides large coverage, but
the packet delivery ratio suggests that there may be an issue to use LoRa technology
in critical applications, e.g., those that can cause danger to health, at least in the
same form as used in this thesis. Use of acknowledgement frames most likely
would have improved packet delivery ratio, but if the number of sensor nodes per
gateway is large, the gateway cannot acknowledge every message, due to the strict
regulations in the license free ISM band.

92
5 Conclusions and future work
The Internet of Things (IoT) and the massive amounts of data it creates will
probably have a big impact in our daily lives in the near future. The IoT applications
have already enabled to carry out many tasks with less effort. For example, if one
cannot remember whether the door was locked or not when leaving a home or a car,
it can be checked and locked with a mobile phone. The lock can also send
notifications to parents at work when kids come home from school, so parents can
stay focused on the work tasks with one thing less to worry.
The IoT applications will definitely solve many everyday problems, but there
may be some issues if the number of sensor nodes grow to even 50 billion sensor
nodes by 2020, as have been predicted. Today the sensor nodes are very energy-
efficient, and in some applications, they can have a service life of over ten years.
What happens after the sensor nodes eventually run out of battery life? Useful
sensor node deployments will be taken care of by replacing the battery or changing
the sensor node to a newer model. What will be done to the millions or even billions
of sensor nodes that were deployed during the IoT hype that will not get a new
battery due to, e.g., lack of funding? Is there a possibility that there are no resources
to start collecting them back, and they are left to decay? This also takes into account
that most of the sensor nodes are powered by lithium or alkaline batteries, they may
contain materials that are harmful to the environment, and will take decades or
more to decay. Considering this now is the time to put a lot of effort into research
focusing on how to extend sensor node service life even more. The author’s first
steps towards passive wireless sensor node networks are presented in this thesis.
Energy harvesting is a popular research topic based on the number of publications,
but commercial sensor nodes powered solely with energy harvesting are not
common. One reason for this is that, in many cases, energy harvesting is
opportunistic. For example, indoor lights can be turned off for long periods,
preventing the harvesting of energy with a photovoltaic panel. In this thesis, a novel
solution is presented that enables the sensor node to have control over an energy
source, which solves this problem in indoors and outdoors where light sources are
available. In future research, the author will continue the work around quality of
service-related issues in the field of energy harvesting, and the goal is that results
will lead to the wider selection of commercial passive sensor node products.
Another approach to increase the service life is to integrate a wake-up receiver
(WUR) with a sensor node. In this thesis, the WUR concept was presented, several
receiver architectures are introduced, and state-of-the-art receiver prototypes based

93
on them are compared in terms of sensitivity, power consumption and data rate.
The performance of state-of-the-art works is gradually improving, and the latest
design achieves the same sensitivity level as commercial receivers have, while
consuming more than a hundred times less. However, the lack of commercial
WURs (and suitable transmitters) limits the practical research. For example,
prototypes created by research groups are not available for outsiders, at least not
easily, which would enable a third party to test a receiver as part of a network in
real applications. The WUR and the pro-active energy harvesting research in this
thesis are mainly related to a WPAN, but the results can also be exploited in a
WBAN and LPWAN.
The potential huge increase in the number of wireless devices will also bring
other challenges separate from sensor node service life, such as interference. One
method to fight against interference is to start deploying new frequency bands. In
this thesis, human body communications (HBC) is studied, where lower frequency
bands are used, compared to frequency bands that conventional wireless sensor
nodes use. In HBC, electrodes are typically used to induce the signal in the body.
The research focused on the impact of the position of an electrode to the path loss.
The results showed that, with the same distance of 20 cm between a transmitter and
a receiver, the path loss varied almost 5 dB. The measurement results were obtained
by mounting electrodes to one test person. In future research, the number of test
persons could be increased to obtain results that are more comprehensive. HBC is
one of the three PHYs defined in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, which was released
in 2012. However, products using HBC have not appeared in commercial markets,
as far as the author is aware. Even though the idea of using human body as a
communications channel emerged already in 1996, more recent publications reveal
major deficiencies, at least in the path loss models. HBC has potential to be widely
adopted, as it operates at much lower frequencies than commonly used wireless
technologies today, which may make it more robust against interference due to the
lower amount of sensor nodes operating there.
The new expected sensor nodes also need to be cost efficient. The LPWAN is
an exciting new network type that has potential to become one of the key enablers
for a variety of IoT applications. In the LPWAN, one gateway can serve a
substantial number of sensor nodes in a large area, making deployment fast and
thereby saving in expenditures. In this thesis, the focus is on LoRa technology,
which is one of the major LPWAN technologies along with, e.g., Sigfox, NB-IoT,
LTE-M, Telensa, and Weightless. The transmission time of a single LoRaWAN
frame depends on the PHY configurations and can vary from some tens of
94
milliseconds up to a few seconds. The first public academic results were presented
of outdoor and indoor coverages using LoRaWAN-compliant sensor nodes. The
results showed that the coverage is extensive (over 10 km outdoors, and a single
gateway can cover a large property) but it is seen that even at sufficiently short
distances, at least a few percent of the packets got lost, regardless of the
communication settings. Furthermore, this thesis presented the first analytical and
measurement results of LoRaWAN performance under the Doppler effect, which
suggests that with high spreading factors, it is probable that the performance will
be poor with sufficiently low velocities (over 40 km/h). The duty cycle restrictions
governed by the authorities limited the number of transmitted messages in the
measurements. Nonetheless, the results have been helpful when designing large
LoRaWAN deployment at the University of Oulu. Considering all this, LoRa
technology is more suitable for a delay, restricted mobility, and loss tolerant
applications than in the dependent applications imposing the strict quality of
service requirements.

95
96
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