LoRaWAN Base Station Improvement for Better Coverage and Capacity

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies provide long-range and low power consumption for many battery-powered devices used in Internet of Things (IoT). One of the most utilized LPWAN technologies is LoRaWAN (Long Range WAN) with over 700 million connections expected by the year 2023. LoraWAN base stations need to ensure stable and energy-efficient communication without unnecessary repetitions with sufficient range coverage and good capacity. To meet these requirements, a simple and efficient upgrade in the design of LoRaWAN base station is proposed, based on using two or more concentrators. The development steps are outlined in this paper and the evaluation of the enhanced base station is done with a series of measurements conducted in Zagreb, Croatia. Through these measurements we compared received messages and communication parameters on novel and standard base stations. The results showed a significant increase in the probability of successful reception of messages on the novel base station which corresponds to the increase of base station capacity and can be very beneficial for the energy consumption of most LoRaWAN end devices.

Nonstandard RNA/RNA Interactions Likely Enhance Folding and Stability of Segmented Ribosomes.

The ribosome is the molecular factory that catalyzes all coded protein synthesis in extant organisms. Eukaryotic ribosomes are typically assembled out of four rRNAs, namely 5S, 5.8S, 18S, and 28S. However, the 28S rRNA of some trypanosomatid organisms has been found to be segmented into six independent rRNAs of different sizes. The two largest segments have multiple sites where they jointly form stems comprised of standard base pairs that can hold them together. However, such regions of interaction are not observed among the four smaller RNAs. Early reports suggested that trypanosomatid segmented ribosome assembly was essentially achieved thanks to their association with rProteins. However, examination of Cryo-EM ribosomal structures from Trypanosoma brucei, Leishmania donovani and Trypanosoma cruzi reveals several long-range nonstandard RNA/RNA interactions. Most of these interactions are clusters of individual hydrogen bonds and so are not readily predictable. However, taken as a whole, they represent significant stabilizing energy that likely facilitates rRNA assembly and the overall stability of the segmented ribosomes. In the context of origin of life studies, the current results provide a better understanding of the true nature of RNA sequence space and what might be possible without an RNA replicase.