Insights on Smart Farming with Low Orbit Satellite

Abstract

Nowadays, most farming technologies are gradually being transformed into real-time monitoring, control and actuation systems with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). These deployments of the IoT over farms have been accelerating due to advancements in sensor technology and communication protocols. Low orbit satellites, for example, has the capability to enable real-time monitoring of the crop over remote places and farms. However, there are numerous challenges to realising seamless farming with LEOs because of low power usage and long-distance transmission requirements from the LoRaIoT sensors over the farms. The main objective of this paper is to study state of the art and present a high-level link budget analysis of the ground sensors and gateways mounted over low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. While the link budget provides ideas on how LEO satellites are prepared for data networking, it also supports improving communication with optimal signal strength. We find that there is a possibility of determining an optimal set of parameters for the ground sensors and the LEO satellite to deliver the desired performance for technical readiness. We observe that different LoRa field parameters such as link budget, receiver power, receiver sensitivity, the path loss can be used at 923.3 MHz frequency. Based on the link budget analysis, we suggest the maximum feasible distance between ground sensors and LEOs. Most importantly, we performed a preliminary analysis of a beamforming approach to improve communication efficiency of the smart farming¹.