Low power Wireless Sensor Network for precision agriculture: a battery-less operation scenario

In this work we present a WSN architecture for precision agriculture. The network is built on a star configuration with two protocols of connectivity: NB-IoT for the gateway and LoRa for sensor nodes. Sensor node owns solar harvesting and radio communication capabilities, low power MCU for simple edge computing, I2C and analog interface for sensors. The hardware has been designed to enable deep-sleep current <1μA. Communication protocol between nodes and the gateway has been optimized to allow synchronization of the transmission/reception window while maximizing the sleep time, contributing to further reduce the power budget of the node. We demonstrate that all these features enable battery-less operativity in specific scenarios.