An IoT Architecture for Continuous Livestock Monitoring Using LoRa LPWAN

Abstract

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.