Energy-Efficient Short-Long Range Communication Network Combining LoRa and Low-Power Radio for Large-Scale IoT Applications

Energy consumption presents a key issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) leading to a significant need for efficient-aware communication technologies. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the most used communication schemes, which provides low-cost and low-power transceivers. However, it offers only a few tens of meters as a communication range, which makes it difficult to cover a large-area network of several kilometers. To solve that, wireless sensor nodes with long-range radio and high-power transmission can be used. To overcome the trade-off between the power consumption and communication range, an energy-efficient platform is designed, which embeds long-range communication radio with low-power short-range communication radio. Thereby, a low-power radio CC1101 is combined with a high-power radio RFM95. The first radio is used to communicate the LoRa module to the low power wireless sensor node, panStamp. The second radio aims to connect the designed interface with the LoRa gateway ensuring long-range communication. With this heterogeneous architecture, the experimental validation shows a good performance in terms of energy consumption and battery lifetime. Therefore, the designed long-range and short-range wireless platform can be active maximum of around half a year with an alkaline battery having 1150 mAh as capacity.