*2.1. Characteristics of a Smart Campus*

It is first important to note that in the literature, some authors use the term smart campus to refer to digital online platforms to manage learning content [30,31] or to strategies or solutions to increase the smartness of the students [32–34]. In this article, the term smart campus is used for referring to the hardware infrastructure and software that provides smart services and applications to the campus users (i.e., to students and to the university staff). In this regard, a smart campus, such as a smart city, can be modeled along six different smart fields [35]:


These smart campus fields can be further refined to determine specific smart services and solutions that should be ideally provided by a smart campus [39]:


These novel smart services and solutions make use of a growing number of enabling technologies, being the most relevant represented in Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Most relevant enabling technologies and applications in a smart campus.

### *2.2. Smart Campus Communications Architectures and Technologies*

In the literature, different approaches to smart campus architectures can be found, but it seems that two main paradigms drive clearly the most popular designs: IoT and cloud computing [40]. For instance, a cloud-based smart campus architecture is presented in [41]. In such a work the authors state that they were able to build their smart campus platform within three months thanks to the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and Microsoft Azure cloud services. Regarding IoT, it has been suggested as a tool to be considered in the architecture of a smart campus to ease the development of learning applications, access control systems, smart grids or water management systems [42,43]. Nonetheless, cloud computing and IoT solutions are often helped by Big Data techniques and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) architectures, since they ease the processing and analysis of the collected data [44,45].

Some authors have suggested alternative paradigms for developing smart campuses. For example, in [46] a sort of opportunistic communications architecture called Floating Content is proposed that shares data through infrastructure-less services. The idea is essentially based on the ability of each Floating Content node to produce information that is shared with the interested users within a limited physical area. Other researchers propose similar architectures, but including enhancements in aspects such as security [47].

Other proposals revolve around the application of the Edge Computing paradigm and its sub-types (e.g., Mobile Edge Computing, Fog Computing), which have been previously applied to other fields [48,49]. Essentially, Edge Computing offloads the cloud from a relevant amount of processing and communications transactions, delegating such tasks to devices that are closer to the IoT nodes. In this way, such edge devices not only offload the cloud, but are also able to reduce latency response and provide location-aware services [50]. For example, in [51] the authors propose to enhance a smart campus architecture by including Edge Computing devices to provide trustworthy content caching and bandwidth allocation services to mobile users. Similarly, the authors of [52] harness street lighting to embed Edge Computing node hardware to provide different smart campus services. The Mobile Edge Computing paradigm is used in [53], where the authors present a smart campus platform called WiCloud whose servers are accessed through mobile phone base stations or wireless access points. Furthermore, other authors propose the use of fog computing nodes to improve user experience [54].

Different wireless technologies have been used to interconnect IoT nodes with smart campus platforms. For instance, BLE and ZigBee were used in [41] to provide both short and medium range communications, although ZigBee nodes can be used as relays to cover very long distances. For this latter reason, in [55] the authors make use of a ZigBee mesh network to interconnect the nodes of their campus smart grid.

Wi-Fi has also been suggested for providing connectivity [56], although the proposed applications are usually restricted to indoor locations and nearby places. Bluetooth beacons give more freedom to certain outdoor applications [57], but they require deploying dense networks that may be difficult to manage [58].

Mobile phone communications technologies (2G/3G/4G) have also been used in the literature [59], but in most cases just for the convenience of being already embedded into smartphones. 5G is currently still being tested, but some researchers have already proposed its use for providing fast communications and low-latency responses to smart campus platforms [60].

Although 5G technologies seem to have a bright future, as of writing, LPWANs are arguably one of the best alternatives for providing long-range and low-power communications. There are different LPWAN technologies such as SigFox [16], Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA) [17], Weightless [18], NB-IoT [15], Telensa [61] or NB-Fi [62]. Among such technologies, NB-IoT, SigFox and LoRa/LoRaWAN are currently the most popular (their main characteristics are shown in Table 1).


**Table 1.** Comparison of the three most popular LPWAN technologies.

There are several recent studies on the performance of LoRa/LoRaWAN technology for certain scenarios, but only a few describe real-world LoRaWAN deployments explicitly aimed at providing communications to a smart campus. For instance, Loriot et al. [63] conducted LoRaWAN measurements in a French campus both outdoors and indoors and showed that the technology can provide good performance over the major part of the campus. Another development is presented in [64], where the authors set up a LoRaWAN-based air quality system in their campus. Other interesting paper is [65], which details the design of a LoRa mesh network system within a campus. Finally, in [66] the authors briefly describe a smart campus platform that includes a LoRaWAN network to support faculty research projects.
