Smart Farm Monitoring Using LoRa Enabled IoT

Agricultural practices need to be transformed in order to overcome future food scarcity due to overpopulation across the globe. By employing emerging, disruptive technologies like IoT in the agricultural sector, it is possible to monitor farm fields using low-cost and low-power consuming devices, to automate irrigation systems for efficient usage of water resources. Weather forecast using IoT can help to plan farm filed activities like sowing, harrowing, harvesting, etc. This reduces negative impacts like yield losses due to uncertain weather changes. LPWAN technologies serve IoT applications in a better possible way so that these applications can overcome bandwidth, power and coverage constraints which are main drawbacks in other wireless communication technologies. In agricultural fields, LoRaWAN protocol or LoRa in LPWAN space gives additional advantages like scalability, security and robustness in designing IoT applications. In this paper, a smart farm monitoring model is proposed. This model utilizes LoRa communication mechanism to send sensor data like temperature (°C), humidity (%) and soil moisture (%) from the transmitter node to receiver node. The receiving node which is Wi-Fi enabled uses MQTT services to monitor the data in IBM Watson IoT platform and to store the same data in IBM cloud DB service.