Abstract
The remote location of agricultural fields leads to the difficulty of deploying Precision Agriculture (PA) systems as there is no Internet access in those areas. Therefore, the use of long-range wireless technologies such as LoRa can provide connectivity to rural areas and allow monitoring PA systems remotely. In this paper, a heterogeneous architecture and protocol that allows communication with both WiFi and LoRa, including multiple hops in LoRa are presented. The design is based on a tree topology comprised of electronic devices deployed on different areas of interest for PA systems such as the canals of irrigation water, the fields, and the urban areas that generate wastewater. A set of practical tests with different configurations have been performed to determine the correct operation of the proposed protocol. The results show that the consumed bandwidth for both 433 MHz and 868 MHz frequency bands remained within the limits for the most restrictive LoRa configurations. Therefore, different deployment needs can be addressed with the implementation of this proposal. Furthermore, the use of packet transmission delays of 500 ms at the CH node results in high successful packet delivery rates.
Highlights
Precision agriculture (PA) systems aid in reducing water consumption and improving the quality and quantity of the production
The results showed the feasibility of the proposed protocol
Systems for precision agriculture are frequently deployed in remote areas with limited or no access to internet infrastructures
Summary
Precision agriculture (PA) systems aid in reducing water consumption and improving the quality and quantity of the production. ZigBee would be a good solution but its usage in PA is yet to grow Nodes such as the Heltec LoRa WiFi v2 [7] allow the utilization of both wireless technologies at the same time at an affordable price. A new communication protocol and architecture for PA systems located in remote areas is presented. This protocol has low overhead and is encapsulated over UDP and LoRa. The architecture contemplates WiFi clusters that obtain the data from the fields and the water channels and transmits it over a multihop LoRa wireless network to the gateway by utilizing a WiFi-LoRa bridge.
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