Mobile LoRa Gateway for Smart Livestock Monitoring System

Livestock is an essential commodity, especially in Indonesia, an agricultural country located in the Asia Pacific. Indonesia has vaster Greenland area than any other ASEAN countries. One way to increase livestock production is by implementing Smart Livestock Monitoring System which relies on Internet of Things technology such as LoRa. LoRa and other Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies offer great advantages such as extended transmission range, extended node’s battery life, and a massive number of nodes per gateway support. However, LoRa utilizes sub 1 GHz unlicensed spectrum which has been very crowded since the last decades and will be even more crowded soon following IoT trends. We propose to use mobile LoRa gateway to mitigate this issue. This paper simulates and compares deployments of LoRa using one mobile gateway with one and multiple static gateways. LoRa is simulated using one mobile gateway and compared with one and multiple static gateway deployments. Simulation result shows that one static gateway is better for narrow livestock area because it gives sufficient Data Extraction Rate (DER) value required for data transmission and lowest Network Energy Consumption (NEC) value. Otherwise, for vast livestock area, one mobile gateway is better because of smaller deployment cost and more than sufficient DER value.