A Systematic Review of Real-Time Deployments of UAV-Based LoRa Communication Network

Abstract

The term Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged in recent decades because this network revolutionizes almost every aspect of our daily life, including products such as smartphones and intelligent vehicles, and crucial tasks such as precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. Myriads of communication technologies have been developed to fulfill the two main features of the IoT: long-range transmissions and low power consumption. Long-range (LoRa) has become one of the vital parts of IoT communication. In this study, the real-time deployments of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based LoRa communication network are systematically reviewed, with a focus on the communication setup and its reported performance. Importantly, the UAV-based LoRa communication network has a low bit rate connectivity to ensure the high reliability of connections, especially in applications that require long transmission ranges. This study provides recommendations for researchers on what research perspectives need to be explored when implementing UAVs for IoT-based LoRa communication. This study also describes publication trends related to UAV-based LoRa communication networks. A supplementary Excel file that contains the reported publications on UAV-based LoRa communication networks is included to show this publication trend.

Mobility of LoRaWAN Gateways for Efficient Environmental Monitoring in Pristine Sites

“…In the opposite scenario, where the end-nodes are fixed and the gateway is mobile, the work carried out is almost limited to unmanned aerial systems that use LoRaWAN gateways as mobile data sinks for various applications such as localization [ 48 , 49 ], the backup communication system in case of environmental disasters or hostile locations such as mines and forests [ 50 , 51 ], and many environmental monitoring applications. The performance analysis of such systems is mainly concerned with the efficient scheduling of the data collection and routing of the LoRaWAN gateway due to the limited power capacity in s [ 52 , 53 , 54 ]. Unmanned aerial systems collect data while hovering over the end-nodes at low speeds and stay in location until all transmission is complete.…”

An Overview to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from Perspectives of Quality and Safety Management in Aviation

“…• Delivering medicine, food and water to the injured Schweizer et al, (2018) • Taking images of areas or infrastructures for damage assessment after disasters Yanchao Liu, (2019) • Food delivery Delivery of Goods Bhatt et al, (2018) • Medicine and blood samples delivery Sumanth Reddy et al, (2019) • Lightweight commercial products delivery Ghazali et al, (2021) • Network gateways Providing Wireless Coverage Wu et al, (2021) • Omnipresent coverage Tazibt et al, (2022) • Data collection S. K. Khan et al, (2021) • Relay nodes between wireless devices Fu et al, (2020) • Crop maturity and yield mapping Precision Agriculture Christiansen et al, (2017) • Field tile mapping Romero et al, (2018) • Irrigation scheduling Faiçal et al, (2017) • Pesticide spraying Kerkech et al, (2020) • Disease detection Stroppiana et al, (2018) • Weed detection Huuskonen & Oksanen, (2018) • Soil texture mapping Kavoosi et al, (2020) • Residue cover and tillage mapping Kas & Johnson, (2020) • Infrastructure internal inspection Infrastructure Inspection Gopalakrishnan et al, (2018) • Surface degradation assessment and crack detection Tan et al, (2021) • Vertical inspection for towers and high rise Jalil et al, (2019) • Power transmission lines inspection Gu et al, (2020) • Wind and oil/gas turbine inspection Nordin et al, (2022) • Onshore and offshore asset inspection Other than their operational purposes, the types of UAVs also differ according to their design features which affect their flying principles. In Figure 5, UAV types are classified first according to their vehicle mass, then the heavy types are further classified to rotor and wing types (Liew et al, 2017).…”

A Survey on Chirp Spread Spectrum-based Waveform Design for IoT

“…[41] Provides experimental performance evaluation of ADR enhancements in a mobile node scenario. [42] Studies the real-time deployments of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based LoRa network. [43] Compares simulation tools for investigating and analyzing LoRa/LoRaWAN network performance.…”