Integrating UAV and LoRaWAN in WSN for Intelligent Monitoring in Large-scale Rural Farms

With the growth of challenges to crop productivity caused by climate changes, high-performance, and sustainable farming techniques are essential to satisfy the growing worldwide food demands. However, today's farming modes still extensively rely on farmers for monitoring crop growth status and making decisions on management strategies, leaving it far behind the desired intelligence and automaticity. This paper proposes a decentralized architecture to enable energy-efficient solutions for intelligent crop monitoring in large-scale rural farms. We employ Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as data mules for data collection with data inference techniques in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). We then facilitate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRaWAN technologies to provide hierarchical edge-fog-cloud network infrastructure, enabling seamless communications among ground sensors, UAVs, fog-layer computational devices, and cloud servers.