Sistema de Comunicação LoRa: Uma solução para Transmissão de Dados no Agronegócio envolvendo Longas Distâncias e Baixo Custo

Abstract

The Brazilian territory covers about 5,073,324 rural establishments, of which 90% have less than 100 hectares. Still, Brazilian agriculture is extremely concentrated in terms of income, with less than 1% of farms contributing half of the total production value in 2017. For a long time, it was believed that the cause of this concentration was linked to uneven land distribution. However, in more recent studies it was realized that access to technology is the main reason for the concentration of production. In the present context, this work aims to use LoRa (Long Range) radiofrequency technology, which allows communication over long distances, with low power and reduced cost, to facilitate the monitoring of activities generated in agriculture along with a farm, where the technology and the internet signal are frequently precarious. The proposed system consists of the development of hardware, firmware, and software for a local server and LoRa gateway, which receives information from different devices and sends it to the server. The solution was able to communicate of 58 bytes over 2 Km with an average of 93% received packets, in a flat and open terrain, where the transmission has a more straight view between the gateway and the devices. However, mountainous terrains prove to be difficult to propagate LoRa modulation, resulting in loss of signal and, consequently, of packets.