LoRaWAN in a rural context: Use cases and opportunities for agricultural businesses

Due to the lack of mobile infrastructure in rural areas, a lot of modern technologies can't be used effciently. With Long Range (LoRa) and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), there are new concepts for wireless long-range communication which have been established. They enable a modern technical solution to communicate in rural areas, where current mobile network coverage is missing. This paper investigates LoRaWAN for agriculture-based use cases. Hence, two use cases were evaluated. In the first use case, the temperature of a horse stable was measured and transmitted by taking the minimal use of the radio channel into account. In the second use case, a self-developed device was buried into the agriculture land at a depth of 10 down to 60 cm to analyze the soil properties and test the permeability of agriculture land. Additionally, a server and gateway architecture with access to a cloud system for data processing purposes was designed and in a second step, a low power prototype with different sensors for data collection for the described use cases was developed. The main benefit of this paper is the evaluation of LoRaWAN for the use in indoor and outdoor applications for agricultural businesses. The presented results are the first step for area-wide real-time monitoring of important agriculture data in rural areas which enables the precision reaction to physical changes.