Abstract
Smart agriculture and wildlife monitoring are one of the recent trends of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which are evolving in providing sustainable solutions from producers. This article details the design, development and assessment of a wildlife monitoring application for IoT animal repelling devices that is able to cover large areas, thanks to the low power wide area networks (LPWAN), which bridge the gap between cellular technologies and short range wireless technologies. LoRa, the global de-facto LPWAN, continues to attract attention given its open specification and ready availability of off-the-shelf hardware, with claims of several kilometers of range in harsh challenging environments. At first, this article presents a survey of the LPWAN for smart agriculture applications. We proceed to evaluate the performance of LoRa transmission technology operating in the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, aimed at wildlife monitoring in a forest vegetation area. To characterize the communication link, we mainly use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Findings from this study show that achievable performance can greatly vary between the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, and prompt caution is required when taking numbers at face value, as this can have implications for IoT applications. In addition, our results show that the link reaches up to 860 m in the highly dense forest vegetation environment, while in the not so dense forest vegetation environment, it reaches up to 2050 m.
Highlights
With the rapid increase in the population of ungulates, especially wild boars (Sus scrofa L.)in Italy emanating due to the migration from the Alps to the southern part of the country, it ungulates destroying crop produce such as vineyards, wheat, and corn fields, as well as causing plant mortality [1,2]
We only describe in detail Long Range (LoRa) and LoRaWAN, where other low power wide area networks (LPWAN) technologies mentioned in Figure 1 are referenced in [11,12,21,22,23,24,25]
Packet delivery ratio ( packet delivery ratio (PDR)), received signal strength indicator ( RSSI ) and signalto-noise ratio (SNR) are the metrics selected to evaluate the performance of the LoRa transmission link. ( PDR) is calculated as the number of packets received by the gateway to the total number of packets sent, with a value of 1 implying 100% success and a value of 0 implying no success at all
Summary
With the rapid increase in the population of ungulates, especially wild boars (Sus scrofa L.)in Italy emanating due to the migration from the Alps to the southern part of the country, it ungulates destroying crop produce such as vineyards, wheat, and corn fields, as well as causing plant mortality [1,2]. Considering the above, several ways have been used to keep ungulates from destroying crop products, which can be classified as lethal or non-lethal. Lethal ways, such as shooting, trapping, string and stone, are very cruel and not environmentally friendly, while non-lethal means, such as scarecrow, chemical repellents, organic substances, and fencing are sometimes inadequate, non-substantial, time-consuming and expensive [4]. Some of these methods even have an environmental pollution effect on both humans and
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