Internet of Things and LoRaWAN-Enabled Future Smart Farming

Abstract

It is estimated that to keep pace with the predicted population growth over the next decades, agricultural processes involving food production will have to increase their output up to 70% by 2050. 'Precision', or 'Smart' agriculture is one way to make sure that these goals for future food supply, stability and sustainability can be met. Applications such as smart irrigation systems can utilise water more efficiently optimising electricity consumption and costs of labour; sensors on plants and soil can optimise the delivery of nutrients and increase yields. To make all this smart farming technology viable it is important for it to be low cost and farmer friendly. Fundamental to this IoT (Internet of Things) revolution is then the adoption of low cost, long-range communication technologies that can easily deal with a large number of connected sensing devices without consuming excessive power. In this article a review and analysis of currently available LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) enabled IoT application for smart agriculture has been presented. LoRaWAN limitations and bottlenecks are discussed with particular focus on their effects on agri-tech applications. A brief description of a test bed in development is also given, alongside a review of the future research challenges that this will help to tackle.