LoRaWAN Infrastructure Design and Implementation for Soil Moisture Monitoring: A Real-World Practical Case

The application of Internet of Things technology in the agricultural sector has allowed to achieve a significant improvement in the process of growing and harvesting products. This has been possible since it allows obtaining a more exact control of the information in real time, thus allowing better decision-making in crop management and thereby improving their quality. Faced with this situation, this paper proposes the design and implementation of a soil moisture monitoring system for a strawberry crop using LoRaWAN technology to allow the farmer to improve the production of their crops, while maintaining low technological implementation costs. The system allows the visualization of the data in real time through a web application, which are obtained from the sensors installed in the ground and which are transmitted through the LoRaWAN network. Once the system was developed using different trending technological tools, its functionality could be verified with satisfactory results. The functionality of the application obtained an acceptance of 94% and an usability a score of 86.87, indicating that the system meets the expectations of the users. Additionally, in the coverage tests, it was possible to verify the long communication range of the installed LoRaWAN devices.