AGRILORA: A LoRaWAN-based system for efficient crop monitoring with radio frequency energy harvesting

Smart Agriculture is an ever-expanding section of agriculture, providing many improvements to already established agricultural solutions and enabling new approaches. However, multiple challenges are presented including management of energy consumption and high costs. This research study proposed the AGRILORA system that uses the LoRaWAN protocol alongside IoT sensing devices and cloud platform functionalities for crop monitoring and management. The pilot site used to test the system is a vineyard in the Troodos area of Cyprus, the IoT devices are placed in the vineyard to monitor various environmental conditions, the data collected is stored and processed on a cloud platform, the platform also contains algorithms that detect danger periods for diseases such downy and powdery mildew. The user can view the data from an online browser, they are also alert when a potential high-risk period happens for each disease. Most of the deployed devices are charge by utilizing supercapacitors instead of the standard lithium battery as an environmentally friendly alternative. Charging is done using energy harvesting via radio frequency (RF) energy, provided to each device by mounting the power transmitting device to a drone that travels around the pilot site to charge them, each device is set up with an antenna that receives this frequency and converts it to power.