Modern Building Services

FEATURE SMART BUILDINGS SMART BUILDINGS 26 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES SEPTEMBER 2021 L oRaWAN networks now rolling out in US and European cities are enabling the remote- controlled services that are making our cities smarter and more sustainable. Smart lighting alone could potentially cut cities’ energy bills by 33-62%, but smart cities offer greater potential than just smart lighting. Once a city- wide network is in place, it can also support other IoT services, such as smart parking, smart refuse collections, and air quality monitoring. A network of water meters can measure the consumption of water and sensors can detect water leaks. Smart parking is an interesting application that can work more than one way. Either a network of sensors can detect vacant parking spaces and direct traffic to them – or maybe a city needs to eliminate illegal parking, in which case they can detect vehicles in a no-parking zone and sending a notification accordingly. Designing any kind of application for smart city Favoured Smart City Networks Michael Castle , Product Marketing Manager at Antenova Ltd, UK takes a look at the wireless technology powering remote- controlled services in smart cities networks means adding wireless communications to the air sensors, lights, or meters within the network, and possibly making the devices wireless for the first time. This article considers the networks and the RF and antenna technology which allow connected devices to talk to each other as one connected, intelligent whole. All smart city applications use networks of connected devices. They might have external antennas on the outside or embedded antennas hidden inside the device on the internal circuit board. Figure 1 shows external antennas and an embedded antenna which is placed inside the device on the PCB.