Low delay data gathering method for rice cultivation management system: IoT specialized outdoor communication procedure

In order to reduce the burden of agricultural work, rice cultivation management systems using sensor nodes, aka field servers, that monitor the environment are studied. It is difficult to install large power generation devices, such as solar panels, in rice fields as they obstruct farm work. In addition, it is also difficult to install the wiring for power supplies. For these reasons, each sensor node must operate on independent power with batteries or other power sources. Furthermore, given that they continue to operate during the farming season, low power consumption is required. It is difficult to use a communication network that requires a line use fee such as a 3G line from the viewpoint of cost. Therefore, in this paper, we report on a transmission method using LoRa, which is a communication standard for IoT, which does not require a line usage fee. In particular, we propose a data collection method that makes it possible to collect the data of all sensor nodes in a short amount of time. This method is effective for low power consumption. The comparison results with a conventional method using a simulation demonstrate that the proposed method can collect all of the data in the shortest amount of time. Moreover, it was confirmed that the power consumption is also lower than the conventional method. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the rate of increase in time necessary for the parent node to collect data, due to the increase in the number of sensor nodes, is lower than that of the other methods. We believe that the proposed method is useful and can efficiently transmit the situation of a rice field at a low cost.