AlLoRa: Empowering environmental intelligence through an advanced LoRa-based IoT solution

Environmental intelligence aims to improve the decision-making process for high social and environmental value ecosystems. To this end, data are collected using different sensors to allow monitoring of different variables of interest. Typically, these ecosystems cover a large geographical area, with spots of low or no connectivity, preventing their monitoring in real time. In this work, we propose AlLoRa (Advanced Layer LoRa), a modular, low-power, long-range communication protocol based on LoRa, that allows monitoring of remote natural areas. AlLoRa has been evaluated and tested in an operational oceanographic buoy that has been deployed to address the specific environmental crisis of the Mar Menor lagoon in southeastern Spain - a region spanning 135 Km2 currently undergoing severe eutrophication process. Our results reveal that AlLoRa offers good performance regarding transfer time, power consumption, and range. The throughput ranged from around 2 kbps with SF7 to approximately 300 bps with SF11; the power consumption per kilobyte transmitted varied from 395 mu Wh to 428 mu Wh depending on the specific device used. The Mesh mode test successfully maintained communication between nodes over 20.33 km. Further tests in various configurations under challenging conditions validated the mesh forwarding approach. Despite tripling the distance, the system maintained reliable data transfer, improving speeds from the original point-to-point setup.