An experimental evaluation of RSSI-LoRa in an olive tree plantations

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used in different types of IoT services applied to different areas of industry such as agriculture. When designing a WSN, using LoRa technology, the environment where it will be deployed must be taken into account, because the RSSI values will be difficult to predict due to the attenuation produced by different types of obstacles, and if not taken into account, it will significantly affect the data transmission. In this paper, the attenuation produced by olive tree crops is analyzed in order to improve the design and deployment of WSNs in this type of crops. To measure the attenuation, a wireless network consisting of a collector node and three sensor nodes has been implemented; the sensor nodes were positioned at different distances from the collector node to perform the RSSI measurements. After the RSSI measurements were taken, they were compared with the theoretical values, and it was found that there is a high attenuation produced by the olive trees.