Interference-Aware Nodes Deployment of a LoRa-Based Architecture for Smart Agriculture in the Southern Region of Senegal

Abstract

In Senegal, agriculture has always been seen as the foundation on which the socioeconomic development of the country rests. However, in the rural world, agriculture remains traditional at a time when the challenges of food self-sufficiency to accompany emergence are launched. In the southern part of Senegal commonly called Casamance, the abundance of rain makes it possible to practice rice cultivation and market gardening research must therefore play a leading role in the introduction of technological innovations, techniques, and decision-support tools to promote productive, competitive, and sustainable agriculture. Therefore, smart agriculture must focus on new solutions for water irrigation, soil quality, and culture monitoring. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is perceived as a very important lever for successful high-end intelligent agriculture. Indeed, the appearance of increasingly specialized monitoring sensors combined with new wireless communication technologies constitutes good decision-making tools. The proposal of this paper consists of a new network architecture that can cover a large cultivation area to carry out water irrigation techniques in Casamance. It is, therefore, a question of identifying the best communication technology among new Low-Power, WideArea Networks (LPWANs) such as Long-Range (LoRa), SigFox, etc which is suited to the environment considered. Also, the choice of the best deployment of sensors for better coverage. The choice of technology must be motivated by the financial costs and the range of transmission. The deployment must fix the optimal distance between the sensors minimizing the interferences according to some parameters specific to the environment. An analytical study is used on the deployment to determine the optimal distance between two gateway nodes to reduce induced interference.

A Smart Farming Management System based on IoT Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture

“…The term "smart agriculture" or "smart farming" has emerged as a result of the application of new technological innovations in the agricultural sector, including wireless sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), smart networks, location systems, data science, artificial intelligence, automation, robotics technologies, etc. [8], [9]. Therefore, the main goal of smart agriculture and smart farming is to automate all aspects of farming and agricultural methods to make the process more efficient and effective.…”