Design of Remote Smart Agriculture System Using LEO Satellite Communications and Solar Power Generation

With the global population continuing to grow, there is a lot of interest in smart agriculture, which uses communication technology to achieve efficient and sustainable food production. However, it is difficult to introduce such systems in areas where power and communication networks are inadequate. In this study, we propose an off-grid smart agriculture system that combines low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication and solar power generation. By installing a device consisting of a LEO satellite communication antenna and solar panels in farmland, it is possible to achieve off-grid smart agriculture in terms of both communication and power. Furthermore, by sending sensing data and control signals to a digital twin located away from the farmland and feeding back optimized information to the farmland, it is possible to achieve remote agriculture through real-time two-way communication. We built this system at the Suzukakedai Campus of Institute of Science Tokyo and evaluated its performance, and we were able to confirm that it had sufficient performance for remote agriculture from the perspectives of throughput, latency, power generation, power consumption, and application operation.