An Advanced Energy-Efficient Environmental Monitoring in Precision Agriculture Using LoRa-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks, as a special subtype of wireless networks, consist of sets of wirelessly connected sensor nodes often placed in hard-to-reach environments. Therefore, it is expected that sensor nodes will not be powered from the power grid. Instead, sensor nodes have their own power sources, the replacement of which is often impractical and requires additional costs, so it is necessary to ensure minimum energy consumption. For that reason, the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks used for monitoring environmental parameters is essential, especially in remote networking scenarios. In this paper, an overview of the latest research progress on wireless sensor networks based on LoRa was provided. Furthermore, analyses of energy consumption of sensor nodes used in agriculture to observe environmental parameters were conducted using the results of real measurements in the field, as well as simulations carried out based on collected data about real equipment. Optimization methods of energy consumption, in terms of choosing the appropriate data collection processes from the conducted field measurements, as well as the settings of network radio parameters imitating real conditions used in conducted simulations were highlighted. In the analyses, special emphasis was placed on choosing the optimal packet size. Unlike in other papers analyzing energy efficiency of LoRa communication, in this paper, it was proven that the adjustment of the transmission speed to the actual size of the packet is important for better energy efficiency of communication and that it can reduce energy consumption considerably. Moreover, in the paper, the contents of a packet that can be used in precision agriculture is suggested in order to prove that the 6-bit packet is sufficient for energy-efficient collection of parameters from the environment, in contrast to the 11-bit packets used in standard commercially available equipment.