The PLATINO Experience: A LoRa-based Network of Energy-Harvesting Devices for Smart Farming

• Published in: 2019 XXXIV Conference on Design of Circuits and Integrated Systems (DCIS) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Escolar, Soledad, Rincon, Fernando, del Toro, Xavier, Barba, Jesus, Villanueva, Felix J., Santofimia, Maria J., Villa, David, Lopez, Juan C.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-11-2019
• Subjects: Batteries; Downlink; Drones; Logic gates; LoRa technology; Sensors; Smart Farming; Testbed; Uplink
• ISSN: 2640-5563
• DOI: 10.1109/DCIS201949030.2019.8959848

Framed within the PLATINO research project we have prototyped an energy-harvesting device specifically designed for supporting a set of smart farming applications. To this purpose, our prototype is equipped, among other components, with several sensors for environmental and energy conditions monitoring and a LoRa communication module to enable a Low-Power Wide Area Network. The physical network will be composed of dozens of PLATINO devices acting as end-nodes and of a drone with limited time of flight acting as a mobile gateway, which will receive the data temporally stored on the end-devices. This paper analyzes the set of constraints imposed by the European LoRa regulations and by the drone itself to design an efficient communication protocol between the drone and the end-devices.