Design and implementation of a LoRa based wireless control for drip irrigation systems

The deployment of drip irrigation systems has been prevailing over the last few decades and it poses many difficulties to manual control them once they are installed on a large scale. A common approach to overcome this issue is to set up a wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN). However, using wireless technologies in the field of agriculture presents several technical challenges, such as achieving long battery life, long-range capabilities and low-cost at the same time. In recent years, many technologies and protocols have been deployed trying to overcome those challenges. One of them is LoRa, proprietary wireless modulation technology. The network protocol (LoRaWAN), which is built on top of Lora modulation, has been studied and analyzed as part of this paper. Considering the cost and the complexity of setting up LoRaWAN, this work proposes a simpler and cost-effective protocol designed specifically to control drip irrigation systems. The project that is described in this paper includes the implementation results of both hardware and software for the wireless nodes, and development of GUI app for controlling drip irrigation systems.