Design of a Long-Short Range Soil Monitoring Wireless Sensor Network for Medium-Scale Deployment

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of the hardware and software components of a soil monitoring Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for medium-scale deployments. It is composed of multiple remote sensing and transmitting devices for autonomous monitoring of soil and several surrounding environmental conditions. Using commercially-available sensor probes, it can gather soil parameters such as air and soil temperature, sunlight, moisture, humidity, and soil pH. The proposed system, subdivided into three node classes, namely sensor, relay, and aggregator nodes, has wireless communication capabilities enabled by short-range packet radio, and long-range/low-power radio (LoRa) modules which can attend to telemetry-related challenges imposed by large area coverage, vegetation density, and location remoteness.