The PLATINO Experience: A LoRa-based Network of Energy-Harvesting Devices for Smart Farming

Framed within the PLATINO research project we have prototyped an energy-harvesting device specifically designed for supporting a set of smart farming applications. To this purpose, our prototype is equipped, among other components, with several sensors for environmental and energy conditions monitoring and a LoRa communication module to enable a Low-Power Wide Area Network. The physical network will be composed of dozens of PLATINO devices acting as end-nodes and of a drone with limited time of flight acting as a mobile gateway, which will receive the data temporally stored on the end-devices. This paper analyzes the set of constraints imposed by the European LoRa regulations and by the drone itself to design an efficient communication protocol between the drone and the end-devices.