IoT enabled Low power and Wide range WSN platform for environment monitoring application

Abstract

Widely distributed and versatile nature of the environmental parameters makes it difficult to monitor consistently and continuously. Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wireless sensor networks (WSN) can make all these parameters visible to us and facilitate to understand the behavior of our environment. As both the IoT and WSN are of the distinct layered platform, we need to face technical difficulties while building an environment monitoring system using the available components. This paper proposed an easy to configure, low cost, low-power, and wide-range (LPWR) platform for environment monitoring applications. We implemented the sensor node using most of the available sensors required for environment monitoring application, used LoRa for a low-power and long-range WSN connectivity and the IoT for global visibility. We evaluated the field performance of the proposed platform in terms of sensor data consistency, data delivery success rate of the WSN for LoRa RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator), SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) and the distance between the nodes. We also evaluated the WSN lifetime by measuring the energy consumption of the sensor node.