*2.6. Key Findings*

After analyzing the state of art, it is clear that a smart campus faces similar challenges to smart cities and that they share certain use cases and communications technologies. Table 2 summarizes the characteristics of the most relevant smart campuses and related solutions, and compares them with the proposed system for the University of A Coruña.

As can be observed, the systems in the table make use of diverse short-range and long-range communications technologies, multiple sensors and actuators, different hardware and software platforms, and provide services for several practical use cases. Although some systems provide a holistic approach to a smart campus, devising potential outdoor use cases and applications, their implementations are mainly focused on environmental aspects, missing other smart fields such as the ones defined in Section 2.1.



**Table 2.** *Cont.*


**Table 2.***Cont.*

people


**Table 2.** *Cont.*


**Table 2.** *Cont.*

In addition, only a few solutions consider the use of fog computing, and even less made use of network planning tools. In comparison, the solution proposed in this article is one of the few academic solutions that deploys LoRaWAN infrastructure. Moreover, the proposed smart campus is almost the only one conceived from scratch to harness the benefits of fog computing.

Regarding the efficiency in the network deployment in terms of cost, coverage, and the overall energy consumption, most of the academic papers do not give any insight regarding the heterogeneous network planning, although in some cases it is specified that it is low cost (without further details). Just a couple of systems give details for the hardware used to build the demonstrator at the level that is described later in this paper in Section 3.
