DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF LONG-RANGE ENVIRONMENT MONITORING SYSTEM

Abstract

Long-range communication and low power consumption are essential characteristics for IoT-enabled devices. The field of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication within the Internet of Things (IoT) is examined in the Design and Implementation of Low Power Wide Area Network for Internet of Things. Determining which LPWAN technology is best for a given use case has become cumbersome, and the majority of monitoring systems use short-range and higher power consuming networks. Through this work, the research aims to leverage LPWAN technology, specifically LoRa network, to achieve continuous real-time data transmission to a monitoring station. To achieve this Arduino microcontroller and SX1278 which serves as the LoRa node was integrated to sensors for real-time monitoring. Data acquired from the sensors was delivered to the LoRa gateway. The LoRa gateway was registered on The Things Network (TTN). An application was developed and integrated to the TTN to visualize the data. The received signal strength Indicator (RSSI), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Packet Delivery Ratio(PDR) were used to analyze the performance of various spread factors of the LoRa transmission. The finding from this research shows that LoRa network is suitable for deployment in monitoring temperature, humidity, Nitric Oxide(NO) gas level with range of 0.5to 25ppm and flame in Nigeria amongst other LPWAN technologies. This system successfully detects four environmental parameters: temperature, humidity, gas level and flame level, transmits the data to a base station over distances ranging from 10 to 500 meters, and securely stores the data in the ThinkSpeak IoT cloud platform. The data are displayed on LCD and web via ThingSpeak.