An Energy Efficient LoRa-based Multi-Sensor IoT Network for Smart Sensor Agriculture System

With the advancement and usage of Internet of Things (IoT), smart agriculture is evolving rapidly. Smart solutions based on IoT can not only help the farmers in maximizing the profits but also help them in reducing the manual supervision of agriculture land. In a smart agriculture system, inexpensive, resource-constrained sensors are installed near the crops as well as at some strategic locations in an agriculture field to collect relevant crop and environment data in real time. This data is then used for both critical, latency-sensitive decision making as well as long-term planning. The key challenges in building a smart agriculture system include high communication latency and bandwidth consumption incurred with computing on the cloud, frequent Internet disconnections in rural areas, and a need for keeping the overall cost low for the end users (farmers). In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our ongoing, LoRa-based three-tier smart agriculture system comprised of (i) Sensing layer, (ii) Fog layer, and (iii) Cloud layer. In particular, we focus on the how the low-power, low-bandwidth and long-range features of LoRa are utilized to transform traditional agriculture land of rural areas in India into smart agriculture system. We present the performance of our current prototype and compare with the existing, state-of-the-arts framework for smart agriculture system in terms of cost, latency and distance.