ENERGY-EFFICIENT IOT COMMUNICATION MODEL FOR SMART AGRICULTURE

Abstract

The need to deploy remote sensor nodes in agricultural environments on a long-term basis without access to or a guarantee of mains power is a fundamental energy problem: How can these nodes operate on limited battery power without reliance on mains electricity? The current communication technologies, like Wi-Fi and cellular networks, are not suitable because they consume a lot of power and have a short range and high infrastructure costs. The challenge to be solved in this research paper is the energy-efficient long-range communication for battery-powered IoT nodes in large-scale deployments in agriculture. In the context of LoRaWAN, the energy requirements of sensor nodes and their behavior might have complex relationships that affect network efficiency. Another hard challenge in low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) deployments is the unification of optimized transmission parameters. Several LPWAN methods have been suggested for agIoT, but the current ones are mostly not able to fully integrate Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) mechanisms into the deployment of a large number of nodes. The proposed framework, tested with a 30-day NS-3 simulation with 50 sensor nodes, is evaluated and shown to reduce per-node energy consumption by 50% as compared to the baseline Wi-Fi, which results in an estimated battery life of 10 days as compared with 5 days for Wi-Fi. The proposed framework achieves a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of 97%. The proposed model gives apparently encouraging results, with a minimum accuracy of 97% in the packet delivery, making the idea of cost-effective, scalable, and viable deployments of smart agriculture in resource-limited environments viable.