SPARC-LoRa: A Scalable, Power-efficient, Affordable, Reliable, and Cloud Service-enabled LoRa Networking System for Agriculture Applications

TL;DR

SPARC-LoRa addresses the need for a scalable, power-efficient, and cloud-enabled LoRa network for agriculture. It combines low-power sensor nodes, a relay-enhanced gateway, and a cloud-oriented stack with MQTT, InfluxDB, and Grafana to enable remote data access and analysis. The key contributions include a custom PCB with an ultra-low-power STM32 MCU, a connection-based upper-layer protocol for reliability, a relay module to extend range, and a fully open-source implementation hosted in the cloud. Field tests in Salt Lake City and UNL validate low power, reliability, and cloud-services integration, highlighting practical potential for wide-area agricultural monitoring.

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud and edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been deployed in various aspects of human life. In this paper, we design and implement a holistic LoRa-based IoT system with LoRa communication capabilities, named SPARC-LoRa, which consists of field sensor nodes and a gateway connected to the Internet. SPARC-LoRa has the following important features. First, the proposed wireless network of SPARC-LoRa is even-driven and using off-the-shelf microcontroller and LoRa communication modules with a customized PCB design to integrate all the hardware. This enables SPARC-LoRa to achieve low power consumption, long range communication, and low cost. With a new connection-based upper layer protocol design, the scalability and communication reliability of SPARC-loRa can be achieved. Second, an open source software including sensor nodes and servers is designed based on Docker container with cloud storage, computing, and LTE functionalities. In order to achieve reliable wireless communication under extreme conditions, a relay module is designed and applied to SPARC-LoRa to forward the data from sensor nodes to the gateway node. The system design and implementation is completely open source and hosted on the DigitalOcean Droplet Cloud. Hence, the proposed system enables further research and applications in both academia and industry. The proposed system has been tested in real fields under different and extreme environmental conditions in Salt Lake City, Utah and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The experimental results validate the features of SPARC-LoRa including low power, reliability, and cloud services provided by SPARC-LoRa.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Overview of SPARC-LoRa Networking System.
• Figure 2: Customized Microcontroller Unit.
• Figure 3: Wireless Sensor System Physical Components.
• Figure 4: Overview of the Architecture of SPARC-LoRa.
• Figure 5: Relay Module Functionality.