Network Performance Evaluation of a LoRa-based IoT System for Crop Protection Against Ungulates

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are deeply revolutionizing our lives, due to the continuous, outstanding development of innovative platforms including, for instance, accurate sensors, cloud solutions, and involving relevant advancements in standards and protocols. One of the recent trends of IoT applications is smart agriculture, which is evolving to solve several relevant problems from producers. In this paper, we present an IoT solution for precision agriculture aimed at repelling ungulates and preventing damages to crop fields. Moreover, this paper provides an in-depth technical description of a complete architecture we designed and deployed for this application, that consists of the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) and the backend system. The deployment also explores the performance of LoRa network in terms of its reliability in a rural area under different scenarios, i.e., in an open, dense and very dense vegetation environments. Experimental results show that vegetations have high impact on LoRa performance. Finally, this paper discusses how the proposed technology is the right one for smart agriculture in relation to crop protection.