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IoT Based Smart Farming: Are the LPWAN Technologies Suitable for Remote
Communication?

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 IoT Based Smart Farming: Are the LPWAN
Technologies Suitable for Remote Communication?
1st Nahina Islam
Institute of Future Farming Systems(IFFS)
School of Engineering and Technology
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton, Australia
n.islam@cqu.edu.au
2nd Biplob Ray
Centre for Intelligent Systems (CIS)
School of Engineering and Technology
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton, Australia
b.ray@cqu.edu.au
3rd Faezeh Pasandideh
Science and Research branch
Islamic Azad University
Tehran (Khorasan Razavi), Iran
faeze pasandide@yahoo.com

Abstract—The Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the defini-
tion of smart farming and enhanced it’s capabilities to monitor
and assess crop and soil quality; to plan planting locations to
optimize resources and land area. The Low-Power Wide-Area
Network (LPWAN) technologies have enhanced these capabilities
by increasing the wireless communication range, by eliminating
the dependency of Backhaul networks and by reducing power
consumption. In this paper, we have presented an experimental
analysis of LPWAN literature with the support of simulation
and actual implementation of a Long Range Wide Area Network
(LoRaWAN) based IoT network for smart farming. Based on our
evaluation and experiment of the existing work and the practical
implementation of IoT based smart sprinkler using LoRaWAN
communication protocol, this paper has presented a comparison
and evaluation of different LPWAN technologies for remote
smart farming. The empirical equation of wireless communication
range of LoRaWAN gateways and power consumption model of
LoRaWAN end devices helped us to determine that, the LoRaWAN
communication system enables an IoT network to be deployed
over 10 kilometers wirelessly in remote settings without being
dependent on a Long Term Evolution (LTE-4G/5G) or other
backhaul network and the end devices consume as low energy
as only 15.36mAh per day.
Index Terms—IoT based Smart Farming, LPWAN technologies,
LoRaWAN, Remote Communication, Smart Farming
I. I NTRODUCTION
The evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the
vision of smart farming by improving productivity, increasing
crop yields and profitability by reducing the environmental
footprint. For smart farming, specially in remote areas, IoT has
become a key technology since it ensures data flow between
backhaul or edge computing system with sensors, actuators
and other on-ground physical layer devices [1]. As data trans-
mission and communication is one of the crucial aspects of
the IoT in smart farming, selecting appropriate communication
technologies is pivotal for success of remote smart farming. A
large scientific research has been conducted on communication
technologies and protocols used in smart farming, addressing
several problems, such as networking protocols and features,
reducing energy consumption, enhancing robustness and scal-
ability etc. [2]. To facilitate IoT over wireless communication,
several IEEE 802.15.4 based communication protocols exist
in literature, such as Sigfox, ZigBee, ONE-NET, Low-power
Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPAN), ISA100.11a,
WirelessHART etc. [3]. Few other widely used IoT technologies
are low-power WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), DASH7
and LoRa/LoRaWAN [4]. Based on communication range, the
existing IoT based wireless communication technologies can be
categorized into the following three categories [5]:
• Short-distance wireless connectivity technologies consist
of Bluetooth [5], RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification)
and UWB (Ultra Wide Band) with transmission distance
of 10 meters or less.
• Medium distance wireless connectivity technologies in-
clude ZigBee [6], LoWPAN and WiFi [7] technologies
with transmission distance between 10 meters to 100
meters.
• Long-distance wireless connectivity technologies can
transmit over 100 meters and above. such as cellular
networks (2G/3G/4G/5G) and Low-power wide area net-
work (LPWAN) that transmits . The LPWAN is a cutting-
edge communication technology specifically designed for
systems that require low powered long distance commu-
nication.
The short and medium range communication protocols, such
as LoWPan, RFID, ZigBee and WiFi are suitable for network-
ing between end devices, such as sensors and actuators whereas
long range communication protocols, such as 4G/5G and LP-
WAN, are useful to cover commutation between gateway to end
node devices. Therefore, cellular communication technologies,
such as 3G, Long Term Evolution (LTE), 4G and 5G appear
to be the most suitable standard for smart farming where large
amount of data and real time data are needed to be transmitted
and processed [8]. However, the availability of these cannot be
always guaranteed in remote areas. Furthermore, the long range
IoT communication in remote smart farming has some specific
requirements as listed below:
• The communication network Must cover large ground
without backhaul connection as some of the remote farm-
ing lands are very large and may not be equipped with
backhaul connection in close proximity.
• Energy and power efficient as remote areas may not be
equipped with continuous power supply
• Must have Openness as open standards have community
based support and development opportunity
 • Scalability so the system can grow without the support of
backhaul connection
• Redundant connection to ensure the system can handle
rough conditions
• Cost effective and should require low maintenance.
The cellular technologies requires backhaul infrastructure
and consumes higher energy, which is a scarce resource in large
and remote farms. Hence, a solution is required that consumes
low power and extends scope for development to fulfill most
of the above requirements. This leads to the emergence of Low
Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN).The LPWAN technology
ensures long transmission range, high energy efficiency, bi-
directional communication and low cost deployment solution.
The communication range of LPWAN is upto 40 kms in rural
zones and upto 10 km in urban zones [4]; device prices are
less than $5 per device; battery life is up to 10 years [9] and
annual subscription cost is less than $1 per device [10]. As for
LPWAN protocol, IEEE 802.15.4 is the most suitable one. It
provides data rate of 20 kbps to 250 kbps with a maximum
outdoor Line of Sight (LoS) of 100 meters. It operates over
different frequency bands such as 915 MHz and 2.4 GHz
in US and 433 MHz, 868 MHz, and 2.4 GHz in Europe
[11]. In this paper, we discuss various aspects of LPWAN
technology for smart farming and outline a case study based
discussion to evaluate suitability of LPWAN for IoT based
smart farming. Rest of the paper is structured as follow; section
II present details of available LPWAN technologies for smart
farming which is followed by a case study implementation of
a LoRaWAN network for smarter watering in section III. In
section IV, we have presented the evaluation, discussion and
comparison of available LPWAN technologies in the light of
the case study. Finally, we conclude the paper in section V
along with some glimpse of our future work; followed by an
acknowledge section.
II. LPWAN TECHNOLOGIES FOR SMART FARMING
The LPWAN technologies provide low data rate and power
consumption with wide/deep coverage to cover massive con-
nections compared to traditional long-range wireless communi-
cation technologies (2G/3G/4G) [12]. Therefore, the LPWAN
technologies cannot be employed for video/audio data stream-
ing, however, they are suitable for connecting objects with
gateway which only require to transmit small amounts of data
periodically over a long-range, while providing long battery life
[13]. The LPWAN technologies takes advantage of highly con-
strained radio links with low data-transmission requirements.
The data-transmission specifications of LPWAN technologies
include a) data rates from 10 to 100 kbps; b) Layer 2 (L2)
payload size from tens to hundreds of bytes; and c) duty-cycle
restrictions because of using unlicensed frequency channels.
These constraints prevent objects from directly connecting to
the Internet through a standardized protocol like IPv6. The
classification of existing LPWAN technologies are illustrated
in Figure 1. The LPWAN technologies can mainly be classified
as non-3GPP (LoRa [14], Sigfox [4] and Weightless) and 3GPP
(NB-IoT [15], LTE-M, EC-GSM) technologies as illustrated in
Figure 1. Classification of LPWAN technologies
Figure 1. Currently, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT and Sigfox are the
most popular LPWAN technologies which are discussed detail
in the following sub-sections.
A. LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network)
The LoRaWAN is a long-range low-power wide-area network
technology as defined by LoRa Alliance [16]. The LoRaWAN
specifications cover the network and the Media Access Control
(MAC) layer on top of the LoRa physical layer [17] [13] [18]
[19] which describes parameters and specifications required
at the physical layer. The LoRaWAN uses license-free sub-
gigahertz radio frequency bands such as 433 MHz, 868 MHz in
Europe, 923 MHz in Asia and 915 MHz in Australia and North
America with data-rates of 0.25-12.5 kbps with narrow bands,
down to 125 KHz [20]. The LoRaWAN communication system
connects a LoRa gateway to a large number of sensors/actuators
capable of LoRa communication. The gateway can be located
at ground or it can be mounted in an Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle (UAV). A UAV mounted with LoRa gateway can fly
over the farm areas for gathering data from sensors placed at
locations that are difficult to reach and very remote. The LoRa
capable UAV can cover large areas using a single gateway. The
maximum communication range of LoRAWAN, D , can be
derived using Equation 1, adapted from [21], where Lpath is the
path loss between the transmitter and receiver; SF is spreading
factor whose value is an integer number between 6 and 12 ; f
is communication frequency; Ptr is the transmit power; BW
is bandwidth; and n is the path loss exponent. The receiver
architecture variables SN R0 , N F , T and k represents signal
to noise ratio, noise figure, temperature and Kelvin constant
respectively.
Lpath 1
D=( )n
( 4πf
c )
2
(1)
c 2 Ptr .2SF 1
= (( ) . )n
4πf SN R0 .N F.k.T.BW
The Equation1 shows the communication range of LoRaWAN
is an increasing function of spreading factor (SF), therefore,
higher SF value will increase the communication range of
LoRaWAN.
This relationship is more evident in Figure 2 which has
plotted SF in X-axis and maximum coverage range of Lo-
RaWAN (in kilometers) in Y-axis.The Figure 2 has clearly
illustrated that for a certain transmit power, expressed using

Figure 2. Maximum range of LoRaWAN vs Spreading Factor (SF)
Ptr (in decibels (dB)) in Figure 2, the communication range
of LoRaWAN increases proportionally with spreading factor.
On the contrary, when the spreading factor is fixed then higher
transmit power increases the LoraWAN range as illustrated in
Figure 2. Within a LoRaWAN network, the end devices (e.g.
sensors, actuators etc.) are very constraint with energy since
these devices are battery operated. Therefore it is important
to reduce the energy consumption of these end devices of
LoRaWAN [21], [22]. Authors in [22] have modelled energy
consumption (per delivered bit) of LoRaWAN end devices as
shown in Equation 2, where the end devices transmit data
message periodically, for example 15 minutes. In Equation 2,
a represents the total amount of energy consumed in each
transmission attempt; Ihead is the total size of message headers;
Ipay is the total payload size and k is a constant expressed in
bit−1 .
a.ek.(Ipay +Ihead )
E=
Ipay
As per Equation 2, the energy consumption, a higher value of
k (such as k = 0.1), of per delivered bit increases steadily with
payload size (Ipay ). Although LoRaWAN technology brings
many advantages, there are still some limitations that sometimes
make it less preferable for some applications. For instance, a
LoRa device can transmit only up to 36 seconds per hour. This
is because, as per ETSI EN300.220 standard, a Lora device can
have a maximum duty cycle of 1 percent for all sub-bands in the
spectrum [23]. This is a major limitation for IoT applications
that can affect the payload size and the delay time between
consecutive messages. However, it is noteworthy that most of
general purpose applications for smart farming would work
well with data collection range between 2-15 minutes. Another
limitation of LoRa networks are they only supports half-duplex
communication, which means transmitting and receiving data
cannot be done simultaneously by a LoRa devices [23]. Some
other limitations of LoRaWAN for using it in mission-critical
[24] applications are listed below.
• The unslotted ALOHA Protocol is used in the MAC
layer of LoRaWAN, hence the packets are transmitted at
arbitrary times as no Clear Channel Assessment (CCA)
are performed. Also it does not contain collision avoidance
mechanism for the sake of cost efficiency and simplicity.
• The end devices in LoRaWAN are not associated with a
determined gateway. As a consequent, there is no deter-
mined handover approach for a moving device.
Finally, it is important to note, the LoRaWAN defines three
different classes such as class A, class B and class C. Class A is
planned to use for sensor devices with battery-powered and tries
to improve power efficiency. Class B (Beacon) is intended to be
employed by actuator nodes. It carries out all the functionality
of Class A. On the contrary, Class C (Continuous) devices are
the most power consuming among the three classes as they are
always active and continuously listens for receiving messages.
B. NB-IoT (Narrow-Band IoT)
The NB-IoT is a narrow-band communications protocol for
IoT applications, which uses 180 kHz of bandwidth. The data
rate of NB-IoT is 250 kbps for down-link communication and
20 kbps for up-link communication. A major disadvantage
of NB-IoT is that it does not support handover, Hence is
not suitable for mobile IoT applications. The deployment of
NB-IoT is another concerning issue as it requires a hard-
ware upgrade of the existing LTE infrastructure [18] [19].
Furthermore, The implementation of NB-IoT is only possible
through telecommunication provider’s IoT service. therefore, it
is neither cost effective, nor does it provide openness as offered
by other IoT technologies.
C. Sigfox
Sigfox [25] is a uni-directional communication protocol and
is a dedicated end-to-end approach for IoT connectivity. It
utilizes Ultra Narrow Band carrier of the sub-GHz ISM bands
and Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulation technique.
This Ultra Narrow Band increases the communication range by
(2)
reducing the noise levels significantly. For each end devices,
Sigfox restricts down-link communications to 4 transmissions
of 8 bytes of payload and up-link communications to 140 trans-
missions of 12 bytes of payload. Sigfox has been implemented
and deployed in some countries, however, there is no roaming
involved while using it in different countries [18] [19]. Overall,
the major disadvantage of Sigfox communication system is,
it is not suitable for two-way communication as it is a uni-
directional communication.
III. LPWAN CASE STUDY
In this section, we present a practical deployment of smart
sprinkler IoT deployment using LoRaWAN communication
protocol to understand its potential for remote smart farming.
The overall setup is illustrated in Figure 3 which has three
major segments: IoT system, cloud based processing system
and sprinkler system. We have used LoRaWAN communication
technologies for wireless communication between gateway to
sensors and micro-weather station in the IoT system in Figure 3.
The gateway has both 4G and wifi communication capabilities
to communicate with the cloud system via the cloud middleware
system- The Things Network (TTN) [26]. The Things Network
is a middleware platform to facilitate interaction between low
power devices and long range gateways using an open-source,
decentralized network to transmit data with cloud based appli-
cations [26]. The cloud based processing system collects and
store data of the gateway via TTN for processing, visualising
and train the machine learning for decision marking to con-
trol water sprinkling optimally. The machine learning model
considers all sensors input, local weather data and external
data inputs about soil and plant which is out of the scope
of this paper. Based on the decision of the trained machine
learning model, the water sprinkling is interrupted by sending
signal to the micro-controller using 4G communication. The
micro-controller is connected to the controller of the sprinkler
system which can turn on and off water sprinkling based on
given command. The entire process is a automated control
system with minimal human intervention. In this discussion,
we will detail the setup and configuration of the IoT system
which is the highlight of the paper. The IoT system is consist
of three components: sensor arrays, IoT gateway and micro-
weather station. Each of the components are equiped with Low
power long Range Wide Area Network wireless technology
(LoRaWAN). This LoRaWAN wireless standard is operated in
the Industrial Scientific and Medical public spectrum (ISM)
in the 915-928MHz band. Our gateway is set up in AU915
MHz as per standard specified for LoRaWAN in Australia. This
exists outside the WiFi and Mobile signals. The LoRaWAN
is safe, secure, and operates at distances more than 10km,
typically 3-4km in urban areas as illustrated using the area
covered by dashed lines in Figure 3. Our LoRaWAN gateway
is connected to the Smart City common infrastructure as this
system utilizes TTN (The Things Network). Ths IoT system
presented in Figure 3 is collected sensors and micro-weather
station’s data in every 15 minutes. Each component of the IoT
system is detailed below.
A. Sensor arrays
In our implementation, we have used array of four moisture
sensors [27] that uses the standing wave principle. The dielec-
tric constant is dominated by the amount of water present in the
soil [27]. The deployed sensors take advantage of the change
of dielectric constant because changes in water content of the
soil result in changes in the dielectric constant of the soil. The
deployed sensors used in the installation is suitable for use in
extreme environments, landfills, and saline soils with a lifespan
of 20+ years in the most extreme environmental conditions [27].
We have chosen four different depth, at 10, 30, 60, and 120 cm,
to deploy four sensors in each point of the park. The installation
depth is identified based on the type of plant growing in
the experimental region, their root depth and soil type. Each
sensor array is connected to a NODE that is a specialized
data logger with serial digital interface-12 (SDI) connectivity
with the sensors. Each NODE utilize a LoRaWAN wireless
module to transfer the data in real-time to the Gateway. The
NODEs are powered by extra-low voltage (12V) connection
but can be also rechargeable battery which lasts approximately
one month without charging. The data collected from sensors
are interpreted in Volumetric Soil Water (VSW) percent (%)
using polynomial calibration Equation 3 [28].
V SW (%) = a0 + a1 x + a2 x2 + a3 x3 (3)
Where, x represents moisture sensor’s outputs in volts and a
represents dielectric constant values, such as a0 = −0.05334,
a1 = 1.19650, a2 = –2.5356, a3 = 1.9961, which are
calibrated constants specific to MP406 sensor type with the
following conditions [27] [28].
Sensors output range : 0 ≤ sensors output ≤ 1.20V
Limits of V SW : 0 ≤ V SW ≤ 100
The MP406 moisture sensor measures changes of moisture
content using the Time Domain Reflector (TDR) technique
by measuring changes in conductivity. These sensors support
response time less than 0.5 seconds [27] which is 0.289 seconds
in our implementation.
B. IoT gateway
Data collected from sensors passed to the connected node
which sends data to Gateway using LoRaWAN wireless com-
munication technology. The LoRaWAN traffic is very low
bandwidth. The LoRaWAN gateway acts as a collector of
edge information from local sensors to the Internet. We have
used UG87 Industrial Outdoor Rugged LoRaWAN Gateway
[29] which supports upto 2000 end nodes. The gateway has
spreading factor of 8, maximum output power of 27dBm Max,
bandwidth 125 bytes/s, SNR of 2.5 and operating temperature
of -40◦ C to +70◦ C. Using Eq.1, we can calculate that it
can support maximum 11km radio coverage. The Gateway is
an 8-Channel LoRaWAN industrial-grade outdoor gateway. It
supports GPS, mobile, backup battery, and PoE 802.3af/at.
C. Micro-weather station
It is important to measure high fidelity localized ambient
weather conditions for an accurate decision of smarter sprinkler
system. The case study illustrated in Figure 3 has deployed
ATMOS 41 [30] which is a modular micro-environment weather
station without moving parts and with a LoRaWAN node to
transmit the data to the gateway wirelessly. It measures 12
weather variables including: air temperature (range of -50 to 60
◦
C), relative humidity(gange of -40 to 50 ◦ C), vapor pressure
(range of 0 to 47 kPa), barometric pressure (range of 50 to 110
kPa), wind speed (range of 0 to 30 m/s), gust (range of 0 to 30
m/s) and direction (range of 0◦ to 359◦ ), solar radiation (range
of 0 to 1750 W/m2 ), precipitation (range of 0 to 400 mm/h) and
lightning strike counter (range of 0 to 65,535 strikes) [30]. The
weather stations data is required to accurately model Evapo-
Transpiration (ET) for site-specific condition. The equation for
calculating ET us our micro-weather stations date is adapted
from [31] as presented in Equation 4.
900
(0.408∆(Rn − G) + γ( Tm ean+273 )u2 (es − ea ))
ETo = (4)
(∆ + γ(1 + 0.34u2 ))
 Figure 3. LPWAN implementation for smarter watering system
In Equation 4, ETo represents evapotranspiration, ∆ represents
slope of the saturation vapour pressure curve, Rn represents net
radiation at the crop surface, G represents soil heat flux density
, γ represents psychometric constant, Tm ean is the mean daily
air temperature, u2 represents wind speed, es represents mean
saturation vapour pressure and ea represents actual vapour
pressure. As we can see from the IoT system deployed in
the case study illustrated in 3, the LoRaWAN communication
system enable us to deploy a IoT network over 10 kilometers
wirelessly which extends opportunity to deploy a large and
complex wire free sensor network in a remote farming land
of 10 Km without being dependent to a LTE (4G/5G) or other
backhaul network. The LoRaWAN is a open standard to support
openness and it works in free ISM frequency range. It has bi-
directinal communication capability for designing smart farm-
ing system with automated controlling of physical layer devices
using actuators. The LoRaWAN sensor system in Fig.3 uses
only 15.36mAh/day which is very minimum. Therefore, the
LoRaWAN communication system meets all requirements state
in introduction section for IoT system in remote smart farming
deployment. Nonetheless, it will be good to have following
improvements in current LoRaWAN communication system for
extended capability for remote smart farming deployment.
• Mesh networking capability between LoRaWAN gateways
to extends its coverage and redundancy for large farmlands
in remote areas.
• Capability to converge between LoRaWAN and NBioT and
Sigfox gateway for heterogeneous deployment
• Increased battery life of sensors NODE to one year
• Improved end mile data protection security for protection
from cyber threats
In next section, we present comparison, evaluation and dis-
cussion of LPWAN communication techniques in the context
of remote smart farming.
IV. COMPARISON OF LPWAN TECHNOLOGIES
In this section, we analyse some features of LoRaWAN that
we found from our experimental setup in the above case study
as well as in the literature [29] and compare them with Sigfox
and NB-IoT as presented in Table I. The features of Sigfox and
NB-IoT are adapted from [32] and [17]
A. Coverage Range
As Sigfox has the range of upto 40 km, only one base station
is needed to cover the entire area but it is a proprietary and
mostly unidirectional solution. The LoRaWAN contains a lower
range of 11 Km which is open and bidirectional standard. The
NB-IoT supports lowest range (range < 10Km) and coverage
capability. The NB-IoT is a proprietary standard and it is not
adapted for rural areas as it is deployed only within LTE
infrastructure.
 Table I
C OMPARISON OF LPWAN TECHNOLOGIES .
LoRaWAN
Bandwidth 125 kHz
ISM Band 433, 868, 915 MHZ
Frequency
(We used 915 MHz in Australia)
Modulation technique CSS
Coverage Range 5 km(urban), 11 km (open area)
Maximum Output Power 27dBm
Battery Lifespan 10 years
Maximum payload length 243 bytes
Bidirectional Yes/Half-duplex Mostly unidirectional and limited half-duplex
Standardization LoRa-Alliance
B. Quality of Service (QoS)
NB-IoT offers higher and guaranteed quality of service,
hence applications that cannot compromise with QoS prefers
NB-IoT. On contrary, LoRaWAN and Sigfox compromises QoS
for lower energy consumption. Hence, these two are more
suitable for IoT applications that do not need higher Qos.
C. Battery life
The end-devices of LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT and Sigfox are
capable of being in sleep mode for the sake of energy efficiency.
However, the NB-IoT end-devices are more energy consum-
ing as they facilitate synchronous communication. Hence the
battery life of NB-IoT end-devices are lesser than that of
LoRaWAN and Sigfox.
D. Latency
In terms of latency, LoRaWAN provides bidirectional low
latency and Sigfox provides unidirectional low latency at the
cost of higher energy consumption; whereas NB-IoT provides
the lowest latency. Therefore, for low latency connectivity
and latency insensitive applications, the hierarchy of the best
IoT technologies are: NB-IoT, class C devices od LoRaWAN,
class A devices of LoRaWAN and lastly Sigfox. However,
LoRaWAN is the most desirable solution for remote appli-
cations because of it’s easy deployment, openness and cost
effectiveness.
E. Scalability
All of the above mentioned technologies are capable of
supporting many end-devices, hence offer high scalability.
Sigfox supports 50k end-devices per cell, whereas NB-IoT
supports more than 100k end-devices per base station [25].
On the contrary, the LoRaWAN gateway that we used in our
experiment can support upto 2000 end nodes [29].
F. Payload length
The payload lengths of NB-IoT, LoRaWAN and Sigfox are
1600 bytes, 243 bytes and 12 bytes respectively [25]. Hence
NB-IoT has the maximum payload capacity.
SigFox NB-IoT
100 kHz 200 kHz
ISM Band 433, 868, 915 MHZ Licensed LTE Frequency
BPSK QPSK
10 km (urban), 40 km (open area) 1 km(urban), 10 km (open area)
14dBm 23dBm
10 years 15 years
12 bytes (UL), 8 bytes (DL) 1600 bytes
Yes/Half-duplex
SigFox company with ETSI 3GPP
G. Deployment model
The deployment model of LoRaWAN and Sigfox are com-
pleted and ready for commercialization in many different cities
and countries. LoRaWAN is deploy-able in 42 countries while
Sigfox is deploy-able in 31 countries. on contrary, NB-IoT was
published under rollout to set up its network over the world.
Overall from this comparison we can summarize that the
LoRaWAN and Sigfox provide very high coverage, low device
cost, lower infrequent communication rate, and very long
battery lifetime. However, when devices are moving at very
high speed, reliable communication and the local network
deployment are better served by LoRaWAN. In contrast, NB-
IoT are better suitable for the higher value IoT applications,
where the investors are happy to pay more for high quality of
service and very low latency.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have discussed several features of LPWAN
technologies and evaluate their suitability for smart farming
in remote areas. It is evident in the comparison of different
LPWAN technologies, the LoRaWAN is better suitable for
a IoT system that expects lower power consumption, long
battery life, highly mobile end devices with very high coverage
range. Hence, we have presented the communication range
of LoRaWAN gateways and power consumption model of
LoRaWAN end devices. To better understand the potential of
LPWAN for remote smart farming, we have present a case
study of smart sprinkler which uses an IoT system supported
by LoRaWAN communication protocol. The results of this
case study show that, a LoRaWAN communication system
increases the communication range of a IoT network to over
10 kilometers wirelessly, which extends opportunity to deploy a
large and complex wire free sensor network in a remote farming
land of 10 Km without being dependent to a LTE (4G/5G) or
other backhaul network. For our future work, we will focus on
establishing a meshed LoRaWAN gateway network to extends
its coverage and redundancy for large farmlands in remote
areas. We are also planning to design a heterogeneous network,
where LoRaWAN, NBIoT and Sigfox can co-exist so that the
advantage of all of these technologies can be utilized in remote
smart farms.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS [24] A. I. Ahmad, B. Ray, and M. Chowdhury, “Performance evaluation of
lorawan for mission-critical iot networks,” in Future Network Systems
The authors would like to thank Smart Irrigation Project and Security, R. Doss, S. Piramuthu, and W. Zhou, Eds. Cham: Springer
(SIP) team members of CQUniversity for their active involve- International Publishing, 2019, pp. 37–51.
ment in the LPWAN case study. [25] O. Elijah, T. A. Rahman, I. Orikumhi, C. Y. Leow, and M. N. Hindia,
“An overview of internet of things (iot) and data analytics in agriculture:
Benefits and challenges,” IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 5, no. 5,
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