Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Measurement
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement

A city-scale IoT architecture for monumental structures monitoring

Tommaso Addabbo, Ada Fort, Marco Mugnaini, Enza Panzardi, Alessandro Pozzebon ⇑,
Valerio Vignoli
Department of Information Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of Siena, Via Roma 56, 53100 Siena, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper the authors describe the architecture of an IoT infrastructure to be used for the monitoring
Received 30 March 2018 of large scale monumental structures. The proposed monitoring network is composed by very low power
Received in revised form 20 August 2018 sensor nodes, provided with LoRa connectivity, able to measure displacements of structural cracks in
Accepted 25 August 2018
buildings with a ten-micrometer degree of resolution. Description is provided about the functioning of
Available online 5 September 2018
the Displacement Sensor, the structure of the Sensor Node and the overall Network architecture.
Moreover, test results are discussed about the data collection and network coverage for the medieval
Keywords:
City Walls in the city of Siena, where two sensor nodes were installed and acquired data for about one
Hall effect sensor
IoT
year. Nevertheless, the proposed architecture can be applied to any context where a City-Scale monitor-
Cultural heritage monitoring ing is required.
LoRa Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Wireless sensor networks
Smart city

1. Introduction First of all, the question of energy consumption cannot be disre-

The wide diffusion of low cost pervasive monitoring solutions
has radically changed the approach to the preservation of Cultural
Heritage. The availability of cheap devices characterized by very
small dimensions has allowed the realization of wireless sensing
infrastructures that are currently used in several different applica-
tions, as environmental monitoring [1,2], industrial monitoring [3]
and agriculture [4]. The broader context of the Internet of Things
foresees the integration of local infrastructures in a global architec-
ture exploiting the ”everytime and everywhere” paradigm of the
traditional Internet. The field of Cultural Heritage preservation is
among the ones that have exploited the technical advances
brought by the emergence of Wireless Sensor Network technology
[5–7].
Monitoring solutions for ancient buildings have been tested and
developed in several sites, and different architectures have been
presented [8–10]: anyway, these applications mainly propose a
local approach, while very few solutions adopt an IoT approach
for cultural heritage management. Moreover, the most part of IoT
frameworks developed in the cultural heritage domain is focused
on the enhancement of the visitor experience [11,12]. Few solu-
tions can be found dealing with IoT architectures for cultural her-
itage monitoring [13,14] since the realization of this kind of
systems suffers from severe limitations.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: alessandro.pozzebon@unisi.it (A. Pozzebon).
garded: the most part of the monitoring infrastructures developed
to be deployed on historical buildings are expected to be posi-
tioned in sites where no power grid connection and wired data
transmission is available. This means that Sensor Nodes must be
provided by some kind of wireless connectivity, being it local (Zig-
Bee, WiFi) or global (GPRS, UMTS). Furthermore, these communica-
tion technologies can be optimized to reduce energy consumption:
nevertheless, the most part of the Sensor Nodes is not able to oper-
ate autonomously for long spans of time without the use of an
energy harvesting solutions.
A second limitation comes from the scale of the site to be mon-
itored: when monitoring a single building, a Wireless Sensor Net-
work based for example on IEEE 802.15.4 data transmission can
be deployed. Conversely, such a solution cannot be applied in the
case of monitoring infrastructures for monumental structures like
for example large castles or city walls. In these contexts, these
communication technologies are not able to provide the required
data transmission range, and the choice to provide each sensor
node with GPRS/UMTS connectivity is not feasible due to high
power requirements and service costs related to the need of a
SIM card for each sensor node.
The solution presented in this paper tries to address the prob-
lems previously underlined proposing a novel Sensor Node and
Sensor Network architectures characterized by very low power
consumption (thus allowing the use of common batteries to power
the node for long spans of time) and wide range communication, in
order to develop a monitoring infrastructure to be deployed at a

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2018.08.058
0263-2241/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
350 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357
city scale. The proposed solution exploits the Low Power Wide
Area Network (LPWAN) LoRa technology to set a pervasive com-
munication infrastructure allowing the real-time monitoring of
large-sized buildings as well as a large number of different sites
in city-scale area.The network architecture has been designed
according to a modular structure, with the aim of making all the
collected data available in real-time on the Internet, according to
the IoT paradigm.
As a case study, the system has been customized to monitor the
structural stability of the City Walls surrounding the town of Siena,
in Tuscany, Italy, by analyzing with a high degree of resolution (in
the order of ten micrometers) the possible displacements of struc-
tural cracks that can be found in several sections of the walls. Nev-
ertheless, the proposed architecture has been conceived to be
easily replicated on different contexts by shaping the network
infrastructure according to requirements of the deployment sites
in terms of dimensions and number of spots to be monitored.
The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 the test site is
briefly described. Section 3 is devoted to the description of the dis-
placement sensor while in Section 4 the architecture of the sensor
node is presented. Section 5 focuses on the network architecture
while in Section 6 the results of the tests in terms of connection
coverage and data acquisition are discussed. Finally, in Section 7
conclusion and possible future works are presented.
2. The city walls of Siena
As discussed in the previous section, the proposed IoT infras-
tructure has been designed to be installed on the ancient City Walls
that still almost totally surround the City of Siena, in Tuscany, Italy
(See Fig. 1). This architecture was built in several centuries: the
oldest sections date back at the XII century while the newest ones
were erected in the XV century. Even if the whole structure is orig-
inal, several sections have been restored in the XIX and in the XX
century, with partial reconstructions of the top sections and of
the external masonry.
The whole structure is around 7 km long and it encloses an area
of around 180 hectares: it is interrupted only by 8 monumental
gates and three passages created in the nineteenth century to
allow the passing of vehicles. The City is built on three hills: this
means the walls altitude ranges from 290 m a.s.l. to 340 m a.s.l.,
a feature that notably affects the data transmission reliability.
The height of the structure varies considerably, but in some points
it reaches up to 15 meters, while the average thickness is around
2 m.
Although the degree of preservation of the structure is mostly
good, some sections are characterized by structural cracks: these
are in some cases centuries old and probably not moving, but in
other ones they could be newer and possible movements should
not be disregarded. This means that perspective structural failures
like the ones that hit the Walls of the Cities of Volterra1 and
Magliano2, in Tuscany, Italy, in 2014 due to meteorological events
are currently unlikely to happen but cannot be totally excluded.
While the whole structure is in need of restoration, since 2016
the efforts of the institution for their preservation were directed to
an eastern Section 1.8 km long, stretching from the ‘‘Porta
Romana” monumental gate to the ‘‘Porta Ovile” one. This section
is divided in two subsections: a 500 ~ m long one, oriented in
south-eastern direction, stretching from ‘‘Porta Romana” to ‘‘Porta
Pispini” monumental gate, and a
1300 m long one, oriented in
north-eastern direction, stretching from ‘‘Porta Pispini” to ‘‘Porta
1
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2014/02/03/maltempo-volterra-perde-le-mura-
medievali-intellettuali-uniti-per-salvare-la-citta-sospesa/867213/.
2
http://iltirreno.gelocal.it/grosseto/cronaca/2014/12/16/news/maltempo-crolla-
parte-delle-mura-di-magliano-1.10507987.
Ovile”: Both subsections present spots characterized by critical sit-
uations due to the presence of deep structural cracks. In the middle
of the first sub-section, at a valley bottom, a Z-shaped section of
the wall presents several cracks that require to be monitored due
to the presence of an underlying drainage channel that produces
moisture in the subsoil. At the northern end of the second-
subsection, close to the ‘‘Porta Ovile” gate, two towers built in
the XV century on the top of a slope present severe cracks that
could be the sign of a progressive sliding of the structure towards
the valley bottom. Fig. 2 shows an aerial view of the historic centre
of Siena with the City Walls circuit. The yellow line identifies the
eastern section under restoration. The blue squares identify the
three monumental gates included in the eastern section while
the two red squares identify the position of the two critical spots
previously described.
3. The displacement sensor
The structural crack monitoring has been achieved using for
each network node a low-cost prototypical displacement sensor
(described in [15]) based on a permanent neodymium magnet, a
Hall-effect sensor (A1302 by Allegro Microsystems) and a temper-
ature sensor (LMT86 by Texas Instruments). The permanent mag-
net was a commercial neodymium (NdFeB) magnetic cylinder
with dimensions 8 mm (height)  10 mm (diameter) and magneti-
zation grade N45, suitable to operate up to a temperature of 80 °C
degrees. The magnet is fixed to one of the two sides of the wall
crack whereas the Hall effect sensor and the conditioning electron-
ics are fixed to the other one. The displacement detection is based
on the measurement of the magnetic flux density generated by the
permanent magnet, which can be approximated by the following
equation:
m
BðrÞ ¼ l0 ; ð1Þ
2pr 3
where l0 is the magnetic permeability, m is the magnetic moment
and r is the distance between the Hall effect sensor and the magnet.
As reported in (1), the dependence between the magnetic flux
density and the distance allows to observe a sensor output varia-
tion as soon as a crack displacement occurs, according to the linear
dependence of the sensor output voltage on the magnetic field
intensity given by:
V out ¼ KIBðrÞ; ð2Þ
where K is the Hall coefficient, I is the sensor bias current and B is
the average magnetic field flux density across the sensor at distance
r.
To mechanically fix the whole sensing system to the monitoring
point, a holder prototype, whose 3D model is shown in Fig. 3 and
the prototype in Fig. 4, has been designed and realized ad hoc in
ABS plastic material by means of a 3D-printer.
As showed in Fig. 4, the designed holder consists of two sliding
parts, and its structure allows to maintain the alignment between
the center of symmetry of the two sections. Fig. 5 shows a typical
installation of the whole monitoring system.
A temperature sensor has been embedded in the same board of
the Hall effect sensor, as discussed in [15,16], which allows for
compensating the effects of the temperature on the displacement
measurement, due mainly to the gain error of the Hall effect sensor
and to the thermal expansion of the holder. As a result, the
obtained measurement accuracy was experimentally evaluated
and resulted in the order of tens of microns, on a full-scale range
of 2 mm. The design full scale range was set considering that the
holder can be mechanically adjusted during the installation phase,
such to tune the reference initial distance to match the mid-range,
 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357 351

Fig. 1. A section of the City Walls of Siena.

Fig. 2. Aerial view of Siena, with the City Walls circuit (In yellow the section under restoration, in white the remaining section) with the monumental gates in the area under
study and the most critical points.

corresponding to the medium-field region of the Hall-effect sensor.
The voltage signals provided by the sensors were conditioned with
low-noise electronic circuitry [16] to properly fit the input range of
the A/D conversion stages (5 V, 10 bit), whereas guaranteeing the
target measurement sensitivity.
4. The sensor network node
The developed sensor network node comes from a first proto-
type, shown in Fig. 5. This device was designed and tested in two
different versions: an End Device version, and a Gateway version,
depending on the presence of on-board GSM connectivity. Both
versions were based on an Arduino Uno board for local data pro-
cessing, integrating an IEEE 802.15.4 XBee Series 2 communication
module based on the ZigBee protocol for local data transmission,
through of an ad hoc XBee-Arduino Shield. The device was also
provided with an energy harvesting solution based on the use of
a 10 W photovoltaic panel and, only for the Gateway version, with
a GSM/GPRS module for remote data transmission.
While the first prototype was able to collect datasets about the
crack displacement every minute, transmitting them every 10 min,
several problems emerged, requiring the project and development
of a totally new typology of sensor node. The following are the
major drawbacks that emerged during the test phase:
 The GSM module requires too much energy to be powered with
the 10 W photovoltaic panel (the module absorbs around 500
mA for data transmission but this value can grow up to 2 A in
352 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357

Fig. 3. 3D model of the displacement sensor.

Fig. 4. The displacement sensor prototype.

case of low GPRS coverage). This means that to allow the contin-
uous functioning of this device a more powerful photovoltaic
panel would be required. Moreover, in case of no GPRS coverage
this solution cannot be employed;
 Regarding the ZigBee Local Area Network in charge of transmit-
ting the data to the gateway, this solution requires the ZigBee
Routers to be always powered. This poses a limit for the reduc-
tion of energy consumption, forcing to employ a solar cell for
each sensor node;
 The use of the solar energy harvesting solution (that includes
the photovoltaic panel itself, a 12 V lead acid battery and a
charge regulator) is in conflict with the need for a small device
to keep low the visual impact on the monument. Moreover, the
solar cell suffers for lack of energy in case of bad weather and
presence of clouds. The choice of higher quality photovoltaic
panel would increase the overall cost of the node to an unsus-
tainable level.
All these open questions required the development of a new
sensor node characterized by a more basic architecture in terms
of components to be employed (removal of the solar energy har-
vesting system and of the GSM module) and with a simpler net-
work topology. The current version of the sensor node has then
been designed to fulfill the following requirements:
 Wide data transmission range (2–3 km in order to transmit the
collected data directly to a central data acquisition gateway,
avoiding power hungry Router nodes and possibly the use of
the GSM module);
 Low consumption levels and long life time, to allow autono-
mous functioning without the need to frequently change the
batteries and to avoid the use of solar energy harvesting
solutions;
 Limited impact on the monumental structure.
The new version of the sensor node is based on the use of low
power components and exploits LoRa technology for data trans-
mission: this modulation technology operates in the license-free
Sub-GHz radio frequency bands of 433 MHz in Asia, 868 MHz in
Europe and 915 MHz in America. LoRa belongs to the family of
 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357
Fig. 5. The first sensor node prototype installed on site.
the LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technologies and
operates according to the LoRaWAN MAC layer protocol. This tech-
nology is provided with two features that make it ideal to be
employed in the proposed scenario: it is provided with very low
energy consumptions and it is characterized by a transmission
range that can reach 3 km in urban areas and up to 20 km in open
space.
The heart of the sensor node is an Atmega328P microcontroller
provided with the boot loader: this feature allows the use of the
same Firmware developed for the Arduino-based first prototype,
with few changes regarding the data transmission channel. More-
over, the microcontoller is directly connected to an SX1272 LoRa
communication module, without the need of any additional
circuitry.
In order to increase the energy efficiency, a duty-cycling policy
based on a power gating solution has been adopted: this is based
on the use of an HEF4060 binary counter, employed as a trigger
to wake up the node at specific time instants. The duty-cycling per-
iod is settable through the oscillation frequency of the counter. The
Most Significant Bit (MSB) output pin of the counter is used to
enable the power up of the D24V22F5 5 V step down voltage reg-
ulator which supplies the microcontroller. The whole circuit will
be then turned off again by the microcontroller resetting the coun-
ter status. In order to further reduce power consumption, a switch-
ing solution has also been developed for the LoRa module that is
expected to be turned on only for the data transmission period.
After the sensor reading, the microcontroller controls the powering
of the MC33269T linear 3.3 V voltage regulator (the SX1272 LoRa
module requires a 3:3 V supply voltage) used for the LoRa module.
The architecture of the node foresees the use of a 12 V battery to
power both the sensor and the node. With such a kind of structure
a rough consumption analysis can be performed. When the overall
node is turned off, the only component effectively powered is the
353
HEF4060 binary counter, whose average current absorption is
around 0:036 mA. When the Atmega328P is awaken, the overall
current absorption includes the current absorptions of the counter
(IHEF ), of the microcontroller (Imc ) of the voltage step down (Isd ) and
of the sensor conditioning circuit (Isen ):
Iawake ¼ IHEF þ Imc þ Isd þ Isen ð3Þ
According to the components datasheets, the total current
absorption value can then be calculated:
Iawake ¼ 0:036 mA þ 10 mA þ 1 mA þ 5 mA ’ 16 mA: ð4Þ
When the sensor node is transmitting, the previously calculated
value is expected to grow due to the presence of the current
absorption of the LoRa module (Ilora) and the voltage regulator
(Iv r ):
Itrans ¼ Iawake þ Ilora þ Iv r ð5Þ
According to the components datasheets, this current absorp-
tion in transmission is then:
Itrans ¼ 16 mA þ 28 mA þ 20 mA ’ 64 mA: ð6Þ
Assuming one transmission per hour, that requires the Atme-
ga328p to be awaken for 15 s, and a LoRa module wake up and
transmission time of around 10 s, it is possible to estimate the
average absorption of the circuit Ihtot as:
Pn
 toni
i¼0 Ii
Ihtot ¼ ¼ 0:236 mA ð7Þ
1h
Using a battery with a capacity C b ¼ 4500 mA h the average life
time tlife of the node is:
tlife ¼ C b ¼ 4500 mA h ’ 19068 h ð8Þ
Ihtot 0:236 mA
This value allows the ideal functioning of the Sensor Node for
around 794 days. The life time could be notably increased using
batteries provided with a higher capacity (for example using a 9
Ah battery the ideal life time grows up to 1588 days). Nevertheless,
this value still allows to avoid the solar energy harvesting solution
together with the battery charge regulator, thus notably limiting
the visual impact of the node on the structure. Moreover, the
whole solution also allows to reduce the overall cost of the Sensor
Node since the total number of components to be integrated is
notably lower than the one used to realize the first prototype.
5. The network architecture
The use of the LoRa communication technology allows to set up
a new multi-layer network architecture integrating different com-
munication technologies, and allowing the realization of star as
well as more complex cluster-tree topologies (see Fig. 6).
In this kind of architecture, three categories of nodes can be
envisaged according the their function: the End Devices, the Rou-
ters and the Coordinator. The End Devices are the leaves of the
cluster-tree structure and they are in charge of measuring the val-
ues. The Routers act as Getaways for the clusters, forwarding the
messages transmitted by the End Devices. The Coordinator receives
the messages from the clusters and from the single End Devices,
and transmits them to a remote data acquisition centre. Following
this structure, 4 different typologies of nodes have been identified:
LoRa Nodes, ZigBee Nodes, ZigBee-LoRa Gateways and LoRa
Gateways.
The LoRa Nodes (whose architecture is described in Section 4)
are the End Devices in charge of measuring the values. From a log-
ical point of view they are constituted of 4 components plus a
power source: a microprocessing unit, the LoRa transmission mod-
354 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357
Fig. 6. The network architecture.
ule, the Sensors and the power gating system that enables duty-
cycling and then power consumption optimization. The microcon-
troller is in charge of reading the sensor values and managing all
the data transmission activities through the LoRa module. The sen-
sors are directly connected to the analog ports of the microcon-
troller while the radio module is connected through SPI. The
LoRa nodes are expected to be battery-powered: the power gating
system acts as a switch between the batteries and the other com-
ponents, turning them on according to pre-defined time intervals
settable at a hardware level (see Section 4).
ZigBee Nodes also act as End Devices, and their logical architec-
ture is very similar to the one of the LoRa Nodes: in this case, the
only difference is that the LoRa transmission module is replaced
with a ZigBee enabled transmitter.
The ZigBee-LoRa Gateways act as Routers forwarding the pack-
ets sent by the ZigBee Nodes. Their logical architecture is different
from the previously described ones since no sensing unit is pre-
sent. These nodes are composed of 3 components plus a power
source: a microprocessing unit and two radio modules, a LoRa
one and a ZigBee one. The microcontroller manages the activities
of the two radio modules, receives the packets from the ZigBee
one and transmits them to the Gateway through the LoRa one.
Since this node has to act as a Gateway for a whole ZigBee cluster,
two choices are possible for energy management. The first choice is
to provide the node with an energy harvesting solution which, in
the simplest case, may be a solar panel. The second one may be
the adoption of a duty-cycling policy also for this node: anyway,
this would require an ad hoc protocol for the synchronization with
the underlying ZigBee Nodes, in order to reduce as much as possi-
ble the length of the activity periods and thus to keep a low energy
consumption.
The last node, i.e. the LoRa Gateway, acts as a Coordinator for
the whole network, receiving all the packets from the single LoRa
Nodes and from the ZigBee-LoRa Gateways, and transferring them
to a remote data collection centre. In particular, it will be provided
with a microprocessing unit managing the reception of the packets
and their transmission to the collection centre, with a LoRa radio
module and with an Internet connection, either wired (Ethernet)
or wireless (WiFi). Since this node is expected to receive an almost
constant data streaming, no duty-cycling policy is applied: the
node will be then connected to the electricity grid. As an alterna-
tive, also in this case an energy harvesting solution may be set up.
The Siena City walls stretch for 1.5 km from East to West and 2
km from North to South. These distances still fall in the transmis-
sion distance of LoRa communication technology in urban areas.
This means that theoretically, depending on the total number of
Sensor Nodes, with a single LoRa Gateway node it is possible to
cover the whole circle of the City Walls. In the proposed context,
the final number of Sensor Nodes to be deployed is lower than
100: in particular, cracks can be found on average every 100 m,
while very close cracks (in a 10–20 m range) can be connected to
a single ZigBee-LoRa Gateway collecting data from the surrounding
ZigBee nodes.
Following the previous suggestions, a single LoRa Gateway is
expected to be set up: the Gateway is expected to be positioned
in a central location in order to reduce its distance from each Sen-
sor Node. In particular, the final location of the Gateway node is
planned to be the tower of former astronomical observatory in
the building of the rectorate of the University of Siena. This build-
ing is located right in the centre of Siena, with a maximum 1.15 km
distance from the city walls, and the tower allows the positioning
of the Gateway in a high position, thus optimizing the communica-
tion with all the Sensor Nodes.
The Gateway is realized using an SX1272 LoRa communication
module embedded on an Arduino Leonardo board: this board has
been chosen due to the presence on board of an Ethernet port.
The Ethernet connection allows the Gateway to be connected to
the Internet: this feature allows it to transfer each received data
packet directly to a remote Glassfish server.
The ZigBee clusters are expected to be realized only in presence
of more than one crack in a short section of the walls (less than 30–
40 meters). They will integrate ZigBee Nodes with the same struc-
ture as the LoRa ones, except for the presence of an XBee Series 2
module in replacement of the LoRa SX1272 module, as well as
more complex ZigBee-LoRa Gateways. Their structure is expected
to be similar to the one of the nodes developed in the first proto-
type (see Section 4): in this case, the GSM module will be replaced
with the LoRa SX1272 module.
 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357 355

5.1. Software architecture
The operation of the test infrastructure relies on three different
software applications: the LoRa Node firmware, the LoRa Gateway
firmware and the server application.
The LoRa Node firmware samples the data from the sensors and
then sends them to the LoRa Gateway through the LoRa module.
The transmission chain starts with the average calculation of the
sensor information by sampling 100 times every 10 ms the mea-
surement data at the analog ports. When the transmission is per-
formed, the power gating circuit switches to the sleep mode by
means of a reset signal.
The LoRa Gateway firmware allows the transmission of the
received packets to the remote data acquisition centre. The module
is continuously listening for the arrival of possible transmitted
packets: once a packet is received, the payload is read and the
transmitting node is identified. The sensor values are then
extracted and transmitted together with the address to the server
through an HTTP POST request.
The server application is a Java Web Application deployed on
the Glassfish server: it provides a set of Web Services that allow
to store each data packet on a MySQL database and to retrieve,
visualize and export them for further analysis. In particular, it pro-
vides the Web Service called by the LoRa Gateway to store the sen-
sor data through the POST request. This Web Service extracts the
address of the node and the sensor data, and stores them in the
MySQL database through an SQL query where the address of the
node is used identify the table in which the data have to be saved.
The Web Application also provides a web page that can be used to
retrieve the data stored on the database by means of a common
Internet browser.
While the cluster tree topology has not been tested, its imple-
mentation would require the realization of two additional soft-
wares, i.e. the ZigBee Node firmware and the ZigBee-LoRa
Gateway firmware. Nevertheless, the features of these applications
are very similar to the ones of the already developed firmwares.
 A second factor that affects the packet losses is the height differ-
ence between the Gateway position and the transmission posi-
tion. A relevant number of packet losses occurred when being at
the foot of the hills. In this case, no line-of-sight was available.
Fig. 7 shows the area that was analyzed, i.e. the central section
of Siena together with some suburbs (in particular the areas of the
hospital and of the train station): the star shows the position of the
Gateway, the white line marks the City Walls circuit while the red
shadow encompasses the area where the presence of LoRa connec-
tion was proven.
In parallel with the test about network coverage, two nodes
were installed in two test points, chosen in the two critical sections
close to the Porta Romana and Porta Ovile gates, described in Sec-
tion 2. These two nodes were placed with the purpose to test the
reliability and accuracy of the sensor as well as the overall data
acquisition and elaboration structure.
The Porta Ovile node was the first one to be installed: data by
this node have been acquired for around one year, and the node
is still positioned on-site. In order to test the accuracy of the node
samplings were collected every minute, using a support battery:
data analysis proved the 10-micrometre resolution of the sensor,
that was able to survey the processes of expansion and contraction
due to thermal variations between night and day: the measured
value, on average 35 lm, is in accordance with the value calculated
theoretically by the architects in charge of the walls preservation.
Fig. 8 shows a data set concerning a period of approximately
one month, the upper plot reports the acquired crack displacement

6. Test results

A set of tests about network coverage has been carried out in

order to prove the full network coverage of the City Walls and thus
the possible realization of a City-Scale IoT infrastructure. These tests
have been carried out by positioning the LoRa Gateway node directly
on the astronomical observatory tower of the rectorate of the
University of Siena and then checking the actual data packet losses
by moving a Sensor Node in different sites all along the City Walls.
In particular, data reception has been tested at each of the 8
monumental gates that interrupt the walls: here the transmission
of a set of packets has been performed and the actual reception has
been verified by connecting a laptop to the Gateway. The data
transmission has been also tested moving counterclockwise by
car from one gate to the adjacent one, defining for the transmission
a 10 s sampling rate. In addition to these tests, data transmission
and reception have been checked moving farther from the city
walls to analyze the coverage of some of the city suburbs. While
this test is not interesting for the City Walls monitoring network,
it was carried out to prove the effective City-Scale of the network.
The results can be summarized as follows:

 Data reception was achieved for each transmission from the

eight gates;
 During the trip between one gate and the other some packet
loss occurred (with a rate lower than 10%): this fact mainly
Fig. 7. The Centre of Siena with the area covered by LoRa connectivity. The star
depends on the travel speed of the car since all the packet losses shows the position of the Gateway while the white line marks the path of the City
were noticed when the car was moving faster than 30 km/h. Walls.
356 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357
Fig. 8. The results of approximately one month of data acquisition. in red line measured crack displacement after the temperature effect correction.
values while the lower one shows the measured temperature. The
red line shows the measured crack displacement after the compen-
sation of the temperature effect which takes into account the ther-
Fig. 9. The Porta Romana Node.
mal expansion of the ABS holder, the temperature sensitivity of the
sensor output voltage, of the electronics and of the magnetic flux
density generated by the permanent magnet. It is possible to
observe a residual slow variation (less then 30 lm) in the mea-
sured displacement that is related to the wall sensitivity to the
environmental temperature and humidity.
The Porta Romana node was placed around 6 months after the
Porta Ovile node and is shown in Fig. 9: this sensor node too is still
on site and operating. This node included two sensors: one placed
directly on the wall and one positioned on a crystal plate charac-
terized by a very low thermal expansion coefficient. This node
was useful to prove the actual detection of the expansion and con-
traction processes of the wall structure.
All the data sets collected during the test period were stored on
the Glassfish server and van be currently consulted through the use
of a common Web browser.
7. Conclusion
In this paper the architecture of a Wireless Sensor Network to
be employed for the monitoring of large monumental structures
has been described. The developed system has proven its effective-
ness in collecting data about possible crack displacements in the
described scenario, thus allowing the development of an alert sys-
tem to avoid possible structural collapses.
The described infrastructure is suggested to be used in a specific
city scale scenario: nevertheless, its features make it a general-
purpose framework that could be employed in each Smart City
application where the deployment of a large quantity of low cost
sensor nodes is required. Moreover, the proposed architecture is
open and predisposed to be expanded modularly. The indepen-
dence of the Gateway from each network node allows the straight
connection to the network of both monitoring systems for more
structures and new typologies of node, in charge of collecting dif-
ferent typologies of data.
While the results about the network coverage are mainly
focused on the city of Siena, its downtown size and its morpholog-
ical peculiarities suggest that a network with similar features could
be deployed in almost any structure with a similar scale.
References
[1] J. Yick, B. Mukherjee, D. Ghosal, Wireless sensor network survey, Comput.
Networks 52 (12) (2008) 2292–2330.
 T. Addabbo et al. / Measurement 131 (2019) 349–357
[2] A. Mainwaring, D. Culler, J. Polastre, J. Szewczyk, Rand J. Anderson, Wireless
sensor networks for habitat monitoring, in: Proceedings of the 1st ACM
international workshop on Wireless sensor networks and applications (WSNA
’02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2002, pp. 88–97.
[3] V.C. Gungor, G.P. Hancke, Industrial wireless sensor networks: challenges,
design principles, and technical approaches, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron. 56 (10)
(2009) 4258–4265.
[4] A. Baggio, Wireless sensor networks in precision agriculture, in: ACM
Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks (REALWSN 2005),
Stockholm, Sweden, 2005, pp. 1567–1576.
[5] J.V. Capella, A. Perles, A. Bonastre, J.J. Serrano, Historical building monitoring
using an energy-efficient scalable wireless sensor network architecture,
Sensors 11 (11) (2011) 10074–10093.
[6] M.C. Rodiguez-Sanchez, S. Borromeo, J.A. Hernandez-Tamames, Wireless
sensor networks for conservation and monitoring cultural assets, IEEE Sens.
J. 11 (6) (2011) 1382–1389.
[7] D. Zonta, H. Wu, M. Pozzi, P. Zanon, M. Ceriotti, L. Mottola, M. Corr, Wireless
sensor networks for permanent health monitoring of historic buildings, Smart
Struct. Syst. 6 (5–6) (2010) 595–618.
[8] M. Ceriotti, L. Mottola, G.P. Picco, A.L. Murphy, S. Guna, M. Corra, P. Zanon,
Monitoring heritage buildings with wireless sensor networks: the Torre Aquila
deployment, in: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on
Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2009, pp. 277–288.
[9] F. D’Amato, P. Gamba, E. Goldoni, Monitoring heritage buildings and artworks
with wireless sensor networks, in: 2012 IEEE Workshop on Environmental
Energy and Structural Monitoring Systems (EESMS), 2012, pp. 1–6.
357
[10] F. Federici, R. Alesii, A. Colarieti, F. Graziosi, M. Faccio, Design and validation of
a wireless sensor node for long term structural health monitoring, in: 2013
IEEE SENSORS, 2013, pp. 1–4.
[11] A. Chianese, F. Piccialli, Improving user experience of cultural environment
through IoT: the beauty or the truth case study, in: Intelligent Interactive
Multimedia Systems and Services, 2015, pp. 11–20.
[12] A. Chianese, F. Piccialli, J.E. Jung, The internet of cultural things: towards a
smart cultural heritage, in: 2016 12th International Conference onSignal-
Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), 2016, pp. 493–496.
[13] A.J. Jara, Y. Sun, H. Song, R. Bie, D. Genooud, Y. Bocchi, Internet of Things for
cultural heritage of smart cities and smart regions, in: 2015 IEEE 29th
International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and
Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2015, pp. 668–675.
[14] A. Perles, E. Perez-Mar’n, R. Mercado, J.D. Segrelles, I. Blanquer, M. Zarzo, F.J.
Garcia-Diego, An energy-efficient internet of things (IoT) architecture for
preventive conservation of cultural heritage, Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 81
(2018) 566–581.
[15] T. Addabbo, A. Fort, M. Mugnaini, E. Panzardi, A. Pozzebon, V. Vignoli, A low
cost distributed measurement system based on Hall effect sensors for
structural crack monitoring in monumental architecture, Measurement
(2017).
[16] A. Pozzebon, T. Addabbo, A. Fort, M. Mugnaini, E. Panzardi, V. Vignoli,
Pervasive wireless sensor networks for the monitoring of large monumental
structures: the case of the ancient city Walls of Siena, Lecture Notes in
Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 10058 LNCS, 2016, pp. 669–678.