Low-Cost IoT LoRa®Solutions for Precision Agriculture Monitoring Practices

Emergent and established paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and fog/edge computing, together with increasingly cheaper computing technologies - with very low power requirements, available to exchange data with increased efficiency - and intelligent systems, have evolved to a level where it is virtually possible to create and deploy monitoring solutions, even in Precision Agriculture (PA) practices. In this work, LoRa (R) (Long Range) technology and LoRaWAN TM protocol, are tested in a Precision Viticulture (PV) scenario, using low-power data acquisition devices deployed in a vineyard in the UTAD University Campus, distanced 400 m away from the nearest gateway. The main goal of this work is to evaluate sensor data integration in the mySense environment, a framework aimed to systematize data acquisition procedures to address common PA/PV issues, using LoRa (R) technology. mySense builds over a 4-layer technological structure: sensor and sensor nodes, crop field and sensor networks, cloud services and front-end applications. It makes available a set of free tools based on the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) concept and enables the use of low-cost platforms to quickly prototype a complete PA/PV monitoring application.