AQUAMesh: A Low-Power Wide-Area Mesh Network protocol for Remote Monitoring Applications in Water Environments

Collecting real-time information on rivers and bays is essential to identify, predict, and manage critical situations, such as floods or chemical detection, which may damage the environment. The LoRa technology has emerged as a solution for low power, long-range IoT applications. Its capabilities provide either a long-range at the cost of a lower data rate or higher throughput at a shorter range. In this paper, we study the capabilities of using LoRa in deployments of private networks for IoT applications. First, we consider the problems that may arise when LoRa nodes are deployed near large water bodies, with antennas at low heights, where the communication link are affected by the presence of the water and nodes maybe not in the range of a gateway. In these cases, the standard LoRaWAN protocol can’t be used because it is not designed for node-to-node communication. We propose an improved LoRa reliable protocol for remote monitoring applications (AQUAMesh) that can replace LoRaWAN. It uses the LoRa physical layer, which provides long-range communications and adds the capability to deal with point-to-point communications using s custom time-division multiple access (TDMA). This proposed protocol overcomes the shortcomings of the existing LoRaWAN and can be effectively deployed in private networks of various applications.