Evaluation of LoRaWAN for sensor data collection in an IIoT-based additive manufacturing project

The continuous evolution of additive manufacturing allows to produce innovative objects that are adopted in several diverse fields of applications. This trend can be further enhanced by the spreading of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm which ensures effective interconnection among distributed, possibly heterogeneous, components and allows remote access by means of commercial devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones. In this paper, we address a large additive manufacturing project which effectively exploits an IIoT architecture by embedding sensors (temperature, humidity, light, etc.) within the produced artifacts, so that they can make available diverse measurement data collected during both the production process (in real-time) and the subsequent lifetime of the artifacts, enabling further off-line analyses. This clearly represents an innovative and challenging feature that needs to be adequately investigated. To this regard, after describing the automation system of the project, we focus on the wireless system that implements the collection of measurements by the sensors within the artifacts. The design process led to the selection of a Low Power Wide Area Network, namely LoRaWAN, as a suitable communication solution. In this respect, we present here the tests performed to assess the actual feasibility and performance of such network in this specific application context. The obtained results are encouraging, since the sensors within the artifacts revealed able to exchange the required measurement data with the automation system in an effective way.