A low-cost lorawan testbed for agricultural watering: Application and measurements

Technological advancements in wireless communication lead to emerging applications of IoT. This induces the development of new wireless communication solutions and methods due to the increased application costs and energy dependent issues. The variety and number of systems developed with the Internet of Things (IoT) have been increasing in recent years. Energy consumption is one of the main problems that is attempted to be solved in this particular area owing to the size of the transferred data over the long communication range. To support such applications, technologies, such as LoRa (Long Range), have emerged with the development of IoT networks that solve energy consumption for wireless communications within large areas. LoRa is one of the leading wireless communication technologies that enables the transfer of low bit-rate data over long distances with very low power requirements. The goal of this thesis is to provide reference measurements for the self-made gateway and LoRa device in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, received signal strength, data rate, time on air and LoRa device lifetime over various communication ranges with the intention of developing a cost-efficient LORAWAN testbed platform for agricultural activities. We anticipate that the obtained measurements will provide informed decisions towards our planned smart farming implementations using the self-made low-cost gateway and the LoRa device.