An IoT Architecture for Continuous Livestock Monitoring Using LoRa LPWAN
Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, via G. Duranti 93, 06125 Perugia, Italy
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Electronics 2019, 8(12), 1435; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121435
Received: 30 October 2019 / Revised: 19 November 2019 / Accepted: 22 November 2019 / Published: 1 December 2019
(This article belongs to the Section Networks)
The Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is quickly becoming popular even outside of its originating scenario of home automation. This paper reports the design, implementation, and performance of an IoT hardware and software architecture conceived for the continuous monitoring of livestock located in barns and during grazing. We have adopted the LoRa low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology to cover the diverse environments, and a suitable configuration of web services to perform data storage, analysis, and visualization. Since the LoRa LPWAN (LoRaWAN) medium access control (MAC) layer does not provide a listen-before-talk (LBT) mechanism, we propose a custom MAC layer with LBT-based carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). The devised system has been implemented using off-the-shelf hardware, and its performance has also been estimated with the help of a C++ event-based simulator. The preliminary results of our HW implementation on the field confirm the stability of the conceived system and its reliability.
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Keywords:
LoRa; Internet of Things; precision livestock farming; wireless sensor network; listen-before-talk
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MDPI and ACS Style
Germani, L.; Mecarelli, V.; Baruffa, G.; Rugini, L.; Frescura, F. An IoT Architecture for Continuous Livestock Monitoring Using LoRa LPWAN. Electronics 2019, 8, 1435.
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