Assessment of LoRaWAN Transmission Systems Under Temperature and Humidity, Gas, and Vibration Aging Effects Within IIoT Contexts

Within the big picture of the Internet of Things (IoT), a brand new paradigm has risen since few years ago in the context of industrial scenarios: the industrial IoT (IIoT), whose aim is to transplant all of the features, characteristics, and scopes of the IoT into industrial settings. The latter ones might be subject to a wide range of environmental conditions from the point of view of both temperature and relative humidity, along with harmful gases exposure and vibration due to, for instance, machinery. Therefore, whenever their monitoring is performed by means of devoted infrastructures, such extreme working conditions must be born in mind during the pertaining design phases. Mostly, industrial monitoring is put into effect by resorting to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enabled by low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies. This set of facilities includes an ample heterogeneity of standards and techniques. However, the long-range (LoRa) modulation and the LoRa wide area network (LoRaWAN) protocol extensively proved to be reliable and robust alternatives. Thus, in this article, the variations of hardware performances of a LoRaWAN sensor node, in terms of transmission capabilities, due to the changes of temperature and relative humidity, vibration, and gaseous atmospheres, such as CO, NO, and NO
₂
, which are typical of industrial processes, are investigated. In so doing, an aging process due to the aforementioned phenomena was induced. To this end, a measurement campaign within controlled environments (i.e., a climatic chamber, a fume extraction plant, and an
ad hoc
vibration test bench) was sorted out, whose results show a physiological performances drop that neither undermines the network reliability nor damages the sensor node electronics.