Low-cost, Long-range open IoT for smarter rural African villages

Abstract

Recent long-range radio technologies are promising to deploy Low Power WAN at a very low-cost for a large variety of IoT applications. However, even though, there are several issues that need to be addressed when considering deploying IoT solutions for low-income developing countries. In this article, we first explain these issues and show how they can be addressed in the context of rural sub-saharan African applications, one of them being smarter villages and farms in a small and micro deployment model. We then describe our low-cost, long-range IoT framework which takes cost of hardware and services as the main challenge to be addressed as well as flexibility, quick appropriation and customization by third parties.