Experimental Evaluation of a LoRa Wildlife Monitoring Network in a Forest Vegetation Area

Mike Oluwatayo Ojo, Davide Adami and Stefano Giordano
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Mike Oluwatayo Ojo: Department of Veterinary Sciences, University of Turin, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy
Davide Adami: CNIT Research Unit, Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, 56100 Pisa, Italy
Stefano Giordano: Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Via Caruso 16, 56122 Pisa, Italy

Future Internet, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-22

Abstract: Smart agriculture and wildlife monitoring are one of the recent trends of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which are evolving in providing sustainable solutions from producers. This article details the design, development and assessment of a wildlife monitoring application for IoT animal repelling devices that is able to cover large areas, thanks to the low power wide area networks (LPWAN), which bridge the gap between cellular technologies and short range wireless technologies. LoRa, the global de-facto LPWAN, continues to attract attention given its open specification and ready availability of off-the-shelf hardware, with claims of several kilometers of range in harsh challenging environments. At first, this article presents a survey of the LPWAN for smart agriculture applications. We proceed to evaluate the performance of LoRa transmission technology operating in the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, aimed at wildlife monitoring in a forest vegetation area. To characterize the communication link, we mainly use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Findings from this study show that achievable performance can greatly vary between the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, and prompt caution is required when taking numbers at face value, as this can have implications for IoT applications. In addition, our results show that the link reaches up to 860 m in the highly dense forest vegetation environment, while in the not so dense forest vegetation environment, it reaches up to 2050 m.

Keywords: Internet of Things; smart agriculture; LoRa; LoRaWAN; LPWAN; 433 MHz; 868 MHz; wildlife; ungulates; NLOS; forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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