A Lora-Based and Maintenance-Free Cattle Monitoring System for Alpine Pastures and Remote Locations

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of continuous, maintenance-free cattle monitoring in remote alpine environments by introducing a LoRaWAN-based edge node equipped with accelerometer, magnetometer, GNSS, and temperature sensing, powered by four solar cells and a Li-ion battery. It implements onboard processing under Zephyr RTOS to compress data into compact frames (~$170$ ms of LoRa airtime at SF=8) and transmits via LoRaWAN to a backend for storage and analysis. Key contributions include a complete end-to-end hardware/software solution, energy harvesting design enabling maintenance-free operation for ~$4$ months (expandable to ~$6$ months with solar), and field validation with two cows demonstrating reliable localization and grazing-state inference using simple head-angle thresholds. The work demonstrates the practicality of scalable, low-maintenance smart farming in challenging alpine terrains and lays groundwork for more extensive deployments and autonomous management of livestock in remote locations.

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is boosting the proliferation of sensors and smart devices in industry and daily life. Continuous monitoring IoT systems are also finding applications in agriculture, particularly in the realm of smart farming. The adoption of wearable sensors to record the activity of livestock has garnered increasing interest. Such a device enables farmers to locate, monitor, and constantly assess the health status of their cattle more efficiently and effectively, even in challenging terrain and remote locations. This work presents a maintenance-free and robust smart sensing system that is capable of tracking cattle in remote locations and collecting activity parameters, such as the individual's grazing- and resting time. To support the paradigm of smart farming, the cattle tracker is capable of monitoring the cow's activity by analyzing data from an accelerometer, magnetometer, temperature sensor, and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) module, providing them over Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) to a backend server. By consuming 511.9 J per day with all subsystems enabled and a data transmission every 15 minutes, the custom-designed sensor node achieves a battery lifetime of 4 months. When exploiting the integrated solar energy harvesting subsystem, this can be even increased by 40% to up to 6 months. The final sensing system's robust operation is proven in a trial run with two cows on a pasture for over three days. Evaluations of the experimental results clearly show behavior patterns, which confirms the practicability of the proposed solution.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: System-wide overview of multiple cattle trackers connected to the server back-end over a LoRaWAN gateway. The collected activity parameters of each active device are stored in an SQL database.
• Figure 2: (a): Illustration of the custom-designed sensor board. (b): High-level architecture of the proposed sensor node, divided into the three main sections; communication and processing, activity tracking, and power subsystem.
• Figure 3: Fully-assembled cow tracker, mounted to a collar with a cowbell. The dimensions of the trackers are 90 mm by 85 mm by 54 mm and achieved a total weight of 1.29.
• Figure 4: Concept drawing of the individual task activation as orchestrated by firmware (a) and detailed power draw on a battery of worst-case event with GNSS not locked (b).
• Figure 5: The proposed cow tracker is attached to the bell collar and worn by a cow during the evaluation phase. The position and geometry of the tracker are designed to reduce the movement during the deployment, allowing to collect data with minimal random movement artifacts.