A Brief Review on LPWAN Technologies for Large Scale Smart Agriculture

The growing Internet of Things (IoT) use in smart agriculture (SA) requires extensive connectivity between intelligent end devices in large-scale agriculture. The broad intercommunication among IoT devices in the field is hampered by the restricted radio coverage and limited capacity to support many devices in conventional wireless sensor networks. The present emphasis in research and development is on Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) as a potential solution for fulfilling long-distance communication requirements while simultaneously reducing power consumption in end devices. LPWAN has emerged as a widely used communication technology for IoT applications because of its cost-efficiency, ability to prolong battery lifespan, and capacity to facilitate long-distance communication. The authors have presented a brief theoretical review and comparison of LPWAN technologies regarding protocol parameters and features, IoT-related characteristics, and cost requirements for deployment in Smart Agriculture. Three popular LPWAN protocols—Sigfox, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT—provide a complete description of their technical characteristics needed for the application and have been compared regarding network throughput, device lifetime, and overall cost. Based on the existing literature, Sigfox and LoRaWAN are the clear winners. However, NB-IoT provides superior performance in terms of latency and quality of service.