The Implementation of a Solution for Low-Power Wide-Area Network using LoRaWAN

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on low-power wide-area network also knowns as LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Networks) technologies that allow efficient and fast data transfer, thus desiring a large-scale integration of various devices facilitating long-distance communications in various fields such as agriculture, logistics, or infrastructure. This category of technologies includes SigFox, LoRa, NB-IoT and others. One area where these low-power technologies can be used successfully is agriculture, in which monitoring the humidity and temperature are crucial. The social-economic context of 2022 highlights as one of the main priorities the security of the food and the raw materials provided by the agriculture field, so the desire is to obtain a large, efficient, and traceable production. Starting from this context, in this paper an architecture based on LoRa (Long-Range) technology and the LoRaWAN protocol it is proposed. We will place special emphasis on monitoring the extremely important parameters in agriculture, namely temperature, humidity and pressure. Although there are multiple works of research in this direction or in similar directions in other fields of activity, we should mention that each of them focuses on certain strictly geographical area and most of the times the results are purely theoretical. The gain that comes with this paper consists first in the fact that there is a practical support implementable and secondly the solution described can be adapted to different geographical regions. Moreover, at the end of this paper, we will focus on the comparison and analysis at the architectural level of two LPWAN technologies, namely SigFox vs. LoRa implemented in the same context in order to find the best results.