Intelligent Farm Monitoring System using LoRa Enabled IoT

Abstract

A change in agricultural practices is necessary to prevent future food shortages caused by global overpopulation. With the Internet of Things (IoT) and low-power and low-cost devices, the agriculture industry can automate irrigation systems to efficiently use water resources by monitoring farm fields. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), along with IoT, can solve bandwidth, coverage and power problems which are the main drawbacks of other wireless communication technologies. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol is known as LoRa in LPWAN space. This protocol provides additional benefits like security, scalability, and robustness. In this paper, a smart agriculture model is proposed to assist in farmers' decision-making and help them to get more productive results. The result of this paper is a prototype equipment for measuring humidity and soil moisture content done by combining the data obtained from the sensors via a LoRaWAN network. This model sends sensor Data such as temperature (degree Celsius), soil moisture (percentage), and humidity (percentage) from the transmitter node to the receiver node using the LoRa communication method. The readings from these nodes are transmitted and then forwarded to the network server through a single gateway. The Wi-Fi-enabled receiving node track data daily on the ThingSpeak platform. The primary goal of this paper is to help farmers monitor their farms more effectively.