Joint Communication and Sensing: A Proof of Concept and Datasets for Greenhouse Monitoring Using LoRaWAN

In recent years, greenhouse-based precision agriculture (PA) has been strengthened by utilization of Internet of Things applications and low-power wide area network communication. The advancements in multidisciplinary technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) have created opportunities to assist farmers further in detecting disease and poor nutrition of plants. Neural networks and other AI techniques need an initial set of measurement campaigns along with extensive datasets as a training set to baseline and evolve different applications. This paper presents LoRaWAN-based greenhouse monitoring datasets over a period of nine months. The dataset has both the network and sensing information from multiple sensor nodes for tomato crops in two different greenhouse environments. The goal is to provide the research community with a dataset to evaluate performance of LoRaWAN inside a greenhouse and develop more efficient PA monitoring techniques. In this paper, we carried out an exploratory data analysis to infer crop growth by analyzing just the LoRaWAN signals and without inclusion of any extra hardware. This work uses a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network to predict the weekly plant growth, trained using RSSI value from sensor data and manual measurement of plant height from the greenhouse. We developed this proof of concept of joint communication and sensing by using generated dataset from the “Proefcentrum Hoogstraten” greenhouse in Belgium. Results for the proposed method yield a root mean square error of 10% in detecting the average plant height inside a greenhouse. In future, we can use this concept of landscape sensing for different supplementary use-cases and to develop optimized methods.