A Systematic Review of Real-Time Deployments of UAV-Based LoRa Communication Network

The term Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged in recent decades because this network revolutionizes almost every aspect of our daily life, including products such as smartphones and intelligent vehicles, and crucial tasks such as precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. Myriads of communication technologies have been developed to fulfill the two main features of the IoT: long-range transmissions and low power consumption. Long-range (LoRa) has become one of the vital parts of IoT communication. In this study, the real-time deployments of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based LoRa communication network are systematically reviewed, with a focus on the communication setup and its reported performance. Importantly, the UAV-based LoRa communication network has a low bit rate connectivity to ensure the high reliability of connections, especially in applications that require long transmission ranges. This study provides recommendations for researchers on what research perspectives need to be explored when implementing UAVs for IoT-based LoRa communication. This study also describes publication trends related to UAV-based LoRa communication networks. A supplementary Excel file that contains the reported publications on UAV-based LoRa communication networks is included to show this publication trend.