Evaluation of Wireless Technologies for an Embedded Camera-based Pest Monitoring System

Thorough pest monitoring is essential for sustainable farming. Wide monitoring coverage can support farmers in maintaining abundant harvests while pesticides are reduced and used more efficiently. Various research projects studied the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to establish smart farming. These devices can gather a vast amount of data to assist the detection of pests. However, when working on remote fields many constraints such as limited cellular coverage and absence of power supply are present. Thus, high computational tasks cannot natively be performed on the fields. To overcome some of these constraints, an embedded camera-based trap system has been developed to detect one particular type of pest: Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (BMSB). To leverage the usage of this system, this paper presents an evaluation of commercially available radio modules for the wireless technologies: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), LoRa, and IEEE 802.15.4. In order to place this system anywhere on the orchard, we analyze the transmission range and reliability for image transmission. The preliminary experiments show that although commercially available radio modules are often easier to integrate due to an additional Microcontroller Unit (MCU) managing the communication, additional power consumption can have great affect on the systems’ battery lifetime.