Empowering Low-Power Wide-Area Networks: Unlocking the Potential of Sigfox in Local Transmission

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have revolutionized long-range communication with low energy consumption, enabling various applications across industries. Sigfox, as a prominent LPWAN technology, operates on a proprietary network infrastructure with base stations deployed worldwide. These base stations receive signals from Sigfox-enabled devices and transmit the data to the cloud platform called the Sigfox backend. This article proposes an innovative architecture that enables local transmission using the Sigfox network. The architecture integrates an ESP32 device to facilitate connectivity with the ThingSpeak cloud platform. The main objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of using Sigfox, even in regions where its infrastructure is not fully deployed yet. The study focuses on transmitting temperature and humidity data to evaluate the network performance. An assessment of the network coverage range based on the Okumura-Hata model is also presented. This analysis provides information on the potential reach of the Sigfox network. The findings of the study highlight that this novel architecture offers a viable solution for various environments, especially in agricultural sectors where it has been implemented.