Citation: Picallo, I.; Aguirre, E.;
Lopez-Iturri, P.; Guembe, J.; Olariaga,
E.; Klaina, H.; Marcotegui, J.A.;
Falcone, F. Design, Assessment and
Deployment of an Efficient Golf
Game Dynamics Management
System Based on Flexible Wireless
Technologies. Sensors 2023, 23, 47.
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23010047
Academic Editors: Daniele Giusto
and Matteo Anedda
Received: 16 November 2022
Revised: 15 December 2022
Accepted: 18 December 2022
Published: 21 December 2022
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Article
Design, Assessment and Deployment of an Efficient Golf Game
Dynamics Management System Based on Flexible
Wireless Technologies
Imanol Picallo
1
, Erik Aguirre
2
, Peio Lopez-Iturri
1,3
, Javier Guembe
2
, Eduardo Olariaga
2
, Hicham Klaina
1
,
Jose Antonio Marcotegui
2
and Francisco Falcone
1,3,4,
*
1
Electrical, Electronic and Communication Engineering Department, Public University of Navarre,
31006 Pamplona, Spain
2
Tafco Metawireless, S.L., 31013 Ansoáin, Spain
3
Institute for Smart Cities, Public University of Navarre, 31006 Pamplona, Spain
4
Tecnologico de Monterrey, School of Engineering and Sciences, Monterrey 64849, Mexico
* Correspondence: francisco.falcone@unavarra.es; Tel.: +34-948-169-741
Abstract:
The practice of sports has been steadily evolving, taking advantage of different techno-
logical tools to improve different aspects such as individual/collective training, support in match
development or enhancement of audience experience. In this work, an in-house implemented moni-
toring system for golf training and competition is developed, composed of a set of distributed end
devices, gateways and routers, connected to a web-based platform for data analysis, extraction and
visualization. Extensive wireless channel analysis has been performed, by means of deterministic
3D radio channel estimations and radio frequency measurements, to provide coverage/capacity
estimations for the specific use case of golf courses. The monitoring system has been fully designed
considering communication as well as energy constraints, including wireless power transfer (WPT)
capabilities in order to provide flexible node deployment. System validation has been performed in a
real golf course, validating end-to-end connectivity and information handling to improve overall
user experience.
Keywords:
golf; LoRaWAN; LPWAN technologies; radio communication; wireless sensor net-
works; ZigBee
1. Introduction
The trends in human settings have led during the past decade to the need of imple-
menting more sustainable and efficient environments and the associated processes. This
is especially true in the case of dense urban environments, such as cities, which by 2050
will account for 70% of the world’s population and demand up to 85% of all resources [
1
].
With this in mind, there has been an increasing effort in the implementation of Smart Cities,
extended more recently to Smart Regions, in which resource usage is optimized, whilst
increasing the quality of life of citizens, enhancing governance and administration at all
levels (from municipal to supranational) and where new business models (e.g., exploitation
of Open Data paradigms) are defined and proposed [
2
]. A smart city/smart region can be
described as a system of systems, in which each one of these systems (e.g., Intelligent Trans-
portation Systems-ITS, Smart Grid, Smart Health, Industry 4.0, water management, residue
handling, etc.) takes advantage of information and communication technologies in order to
provide context aware interactive environments. Moreover, each one of these systems, by
means of interoperability principles can be coupled to a joint smart city platform, in order
to further increase efficiency by taking advantage of the synergies among these systems
(e.g., ITS interoperates with Smart Grid in order to plan electric vehicle charging, etc.).
Context aware environments require a high level of interactivity, considering that a
large number of sensors and actuators can be present in a given scenario, as foreseen in
Sensors 2023, 23, 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/s23010047 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
