An IoT Rainfall Monitoring Application based on Wireless Communication Technologies

Meteorological stations regularly monitor the climate with sensors. Data collected by sensors are transferred to the data server manually or via cellular or satellite networks. This increases the operational cost of the system. This paper develops a prototype of an Internet of Things (IoT) application to monitor rainfall remotely and independently of third-party infrastructure for data transmission. We propose a hybrid architecture that relies on both short and long-range communication and we compare the performance of Wi-Fi and LoRa technologies. Results show that Wi-Fi provides higher bandwidth over short distances, while LoRa provides resilient communication over long distances. Hence, we use an IoT platform deployed in a local server, based on the hybrid architecture proposed in this paper.