(Not so) intuitive results from a smart agriculture low-power wireless mesh deployment

Abstract

A 21-node low-power wireless mesh network is deployed in a peach orchard. The network serves as a frost event prediction system. On top of sensor values, devices also report network statistics. In 3 months of operations, the network has produced over 4 million temperature values, and over 350,000 network statistics. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the statistics, in order to precisely understand the performance of the network. Nodes in the network exhibit an expected lifetime between 4 and 16 years, with an end-to-end reliability of 100%. We show how -- contrary to popular belief -- wireless links are symmetric. Thanks to the use of Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), the network topology is very stable, with ≤5 link changes per day in the entire network.