Demonstration of Direct-to-Satellite IoT for Monitoring Water Reservoirs in Remote Areas to Prevent Wildfires

Non-Terrestrial Networks are three-dimension net-works composed of aircraft and spacecraft nodes that extend the services provided by terrestrial infrastructure. This kind of network plays a key role in the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity in remote areas, which are more probable to currently lack it. Among the different alternatives, the usage of satellite systems to conform these new networks that provides IoT connectivity has emerged as a promising solution. In this scenario, IoT devices directly interacts with satellites with Low-Power Wide Area Network technologies. This approach is defined in the literature as a Direct-to-Satellite IoT (DtS-IoT) architecture. This work contributes to the DtS-IoT concept by presenting an experimental deployment following this architecture. Specifically, a dedicated sensor that monitors water reservoirs located in remote areas are installed. The sensor collects the status of the reservoirs and uploads it to the satellite. This application becomes essential for the maintenance of the firefighter infrastructure, which typically is located in the mountains. This work presents thus the architecture design, the sensor setup, and discusses the achieved results of an in-field campaign. These results demon-strate the feasibility of this deployment with current technologies, and promotes its deployment in future projects.