Leveraging BLE and LoRa in IoT network for wildlife monitoring system (WMS)

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new dual radio IoT network architecture for wildlife monitoring system (WMS). WMS leverages bluetooth low energy (BLE) in low power wide area networks (LPWANs) by dynamically changing the operating radio based on the proximity among herd of wild animals. This approach will facilitate ultra-low power IoT devices to be deployed for sustainable wildlife monitoring application. In addition we present an analytical model to investigate the performance of the proposed IoT network in terms of energy consumption under a wildlife monitoring use-case. The simulation results show that the dual radio network leads to a higher energy efficiency when compared to the network utilizing only LPWAN. Moreover, our network readily doubles the network life time for various data traffic rates.