The Future of Smart Buildings and How LoRa Creates

 Nowadays, an average urban human spends nearly 90% of the time in a building - be it a workplace, school, hospital or home. Conditions in buildings even those outside must be well-kept to achieve a conducive lifestyle for everyone. Whether the room is well lit, the temperature comfortable, or the air too humid or dry, are all factors that may disrupt your living and productivity if left unmaintained. Companies and community organizations have realized this challenge and begun the hunt for solutions through the idea of smart buildings.

Smart buildings are infrastructures that use technology to share information about their internal and external conditions via a communication system to optimize the building's performance. One technology that smart buildings can leverage is the Internet of Things (IoT). Researchers have long projected the future of revolutionizing traditional building automation and management systems with the continuous development of IoT. Even today, thanks to this evolution, people enjoy automated comfort from a smart building's system while administrators enjoy heightened efficiency, less work, and minimized costs.

However, not every building has upgraded to such advanced operations. The vision for a building ideally begins even before its construction so, modern architects and engineers must be aware of the increasing possibilities of automation and take them into account at the design stage. It is much easier to implement a smart system if you have already laid the foundations for it. Expanding this system would also be much easier and aesthetically pleasing if it were to be anticipated during construction.

Since this is not the case for every old building in cities, IoT can still be of help as the flexibility offered by wireless devices now allows placement anywhere in a building without pre-planning sensor locations or even seeking permission from the building owner in some cases. And among the technologies in IoT, LoRaWAN is an ideal one.

LoRa is a protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated devices to the Internet in wide networks. It is usually used for situations that require deep indoor coverage and long battery life. In numerous projects that tested this technology, LoRa has optimized leak detection, sub-metering, smoke detection, intrusion and presence monitoring, rodent trap monitoring and predictive cleaning and maintenance in buildings. Developers have also discovered how LoRa can cover outdoor areas cost-effectively to enable activities such as smart parking, smart lighting, asset or vehicle tracking, and smart irrigation. Safer evacuation systems for tenants in a building have also been continuously innovated by LoRa.

And to make use of LoRa in any of its applications, especially in smart buildings, LoRa nodes or sensors are placed in remote areas, where coverage is hard to ensure and where access for battery replacement is difficult. LoRa nodes are devices in IoT that capture information from the environment for analysis. Without them, the operations will not start as no data will be gathered. On the internet, many high-precision LoRa nodes have been made easily available by leading IoT solutions providers. Among these nodes is RAK7204 from RAKwireless, a LoRaWAN node that is known for its integrated design that allows its easy assembly.

Nodes, however, are not enough for a system to work. The data they collect must go to an information processor - the gateway. When a node is used in conjunction with a LoRa gateway , take the RAK7258 Indoor Gateway as an example, deploying a LoRa sensor network becomes a breeze. You only need to mount the nodes on a wall or the ceiling, power them on and start monitoring the working conditions of the building. You also need not worry about the LoRa gateway's coverage as its coverage is found to be significantly wide. In a test done by RAKwireless, the horizontal coverage of RAK7258 (which was placed on the third floor of a 17-store building) covered the whole floor of the building and its vertical coverage reached about half of the 17 stories of the building. Should your gateway come with a built-in LoRa server like RAK7258, the time from deploying the gateways and nodes to having a functioning LoRa network is further reduced.

As seen, LoRa has made it easy for buildings to achieve aut