LoRa Video Streaming in Rural Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN) have been mainly applied in urban areas using Zigbee, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to forward the data, but no application has been designed in rural areas due to the large distances and energy restrictions. The related literature shows only one deployment with LoRa using a Raspberry Pi 3 node, but no measure of real video delivery was performed. In this paper, we propose the use of LoRa technology for video streaming in a WMSN for smart agriculture. The objective of this design is to monitor the fields by having nodes with sensors, nodes with cameras, and aggregator nodes. Two nodes are used to test the performance of the network and ensure that video streaming with LoRa is possible. The emitter node, an Arduino ATMega, sends a video to the receiver node, an ESP32. The LoRa UART SX1278 was used in both nodes to communicate them. Results in the laboratory, with both nodes close, indicate that the minimum latency is achieved using a block size of 6408 bytes. Four video resolutions and 4 video extensions are tested to evaluate the maximum video quality which can be streamed. The results in a real scenario with nodes spaced 731 meters indicated that video in .mp4 video format at 240 p resolution can be streamed correctly with a medium access time of 3.2 s and 0% of packet loss for a video of 5 s. Thus, it is possible to affirm that LoRa can be used for video streaming.