Monitoring Food Storage with the Help of a LoRa-based DTWSN

Food such as grain, potatoes, onions and other vegetables as well as fruits is stored in warehouses after harvesting which ensures availability throughout the year. Good storage conditions are crucial to avoid loss due to wrong conditions such as temperature, humidity, and attacks by bacteria. Therefore, modern warehouses are equipped with Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems including sensors that continuously monitor the warehouse to provide optimal conditions for storage. So far such monitoring sensors are installed outside the goods, thus, providing a coarse estimate of the real conditions only. We present a LoRa-based system which improves such warehouse monitoring by enabling sensor nodes to transmit data from the inside of food storage boxes to a sink. Our system was evaluated in a potato warehouse; this is a challenging environment due to the high water content of the potatoes (up to 80%). The results show that with the help of the developed system a communication through more than 3 m of potatoes is possible and that the developed communication protocol works reliably.