LoRa-Based Communication System for Monitoring Water Quality of Lakes and Reservoirs

This paper describes a conceptual framework for the establishment of a Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN)-based communication system for monitoring water quality of lakes and reservoirs. The proposed system allows connection of multiple sensors to the LoRa transceivers and enables data transmission to a cloud server. In a proof-of-concept test, the LoRa gateway was set up, a temperature sensor node was connected and used to monitor lake water temperature, and data was transferred to LoRa gateway which serves as the central monitoring system and is visualized on a centralized dashboard. In this work, a coverage test of the proposed system is also carried out to test the LoRAWAN communication range in the urban environment. We find that the range of the system varies from 150-2,500 m and it is affected by the antenna positioning placement and obstacles in between the gateway and the sensor node. The maximum range was found to be 2.5 km when there was clear line of sight between the gateway and sensor node.