Study of Wireless Communication Technologies on Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture is a suitable solution to these challenges such as shortage of food, deterioration of soil properties and water scarcity. The developments of modern information technologies and wireless communication technologies are the foundations for the realization of precision agriculture. This paper attempts to find suitable, feasible and practical wireless communication technologies for precision agriculture by analyzing the agricultural application scenarios and experimental tests. Three kinds of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) architecture, which is based on narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT), Long Range (LoRa) and ZigBee wireless communication technologies respectively, are presented for precision agriculture applications. The feasibility of three WSN architectures is verified by corresponding tests. By measuring the normal communication time, the power consumption of three wireless communication technologies is compared. Field tests and comprehensive analysis show that ZigBee is a better choice for monitoring facility agriculture, while LoRa and NB-IoT were identified as two suitable wireless communication technologies for field agriculture scenarios.

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