Low-Powered Agriculture IoT Systems with LoRa

Monitoring is key to increase the efficiency of food storage in the open field in terms of cost, logistics and quality of the crops. For the long range data transmission in such environments, mobile technologies are not suitable, as the end devices are generally battery-limited. In this work, a prototype has been developed for monitoring goods in storage. The battery life time of this prototype is analysed in terms of calculations as well as measurements, on LoRa technology. Our results show that (i) while sleeping current has the smallest percentage, it has the greatest impact in increasing battery life, (ii) monitoring node shall have low self discharge battery for long battery life, and (iii) sensors are the main power sink that deplete battery.