Low-Power IoT Environmental Monitoring and Smart Agriculture for Unconnected Rural Areas

This paper considers massive IoT devices deployed in remote areas without terrestrial Internet connectivity. IoT devices use sensors for continuously monitoring ground data for smart agriculture and environmental purposes. We connect these sensors to the Internet via an aerial system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), or cubesat. Then, our particular focus is on using a UAV flying over the remote area that receives data from distributed IoT devices on the ground. An opportunistic protocol has been introduced that is based on the synchronization of sensor transmission to be consistent with the UAV pass close to them. A model has allowed validating the applicability of this scheme depending on a set of parameters, including the distance to be covered. Finally, a preliminary experimental testbed has been built to verify a path loss model in a benchmark configuration with the gateway on the ground. This experiment will be replicated using the gateway onboard the UAV.