Power Efficient Range Extension Techniques for Cattle Health Monitoring Application

Monitoring cattle behavior regularly is essential for early detection of illness, stress or unusual activity. Although many cattle health monitoring systems exist in the literature, they often overlook techniques that balance power efficiency with range extension. Thus, this paper proposes Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based power efficient range extension techniques. These methods include designing high gain antennas for both the transmitter and receiver, using retransmissions and integrating a Power Amplifier (PA) at the transmitter and a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) at the receiver. By optimizing the PA’s transmission power and utilizing an LNA, the system achieves a communication range of upto approximately 2.5 km while conserving power. Moreover, a key novelty of this work is the smart power control mechanism that fine tunes the PA’s output at the end node, providing an effective balance between the extended range and reduced power usage- an area that has been largely overlooked in existing BLE based cattle monitoring solutions.