RURAL MONITORING SYSTEM BASED IN LORAWAN NETWORK PROTOCOL

In areas where telecommunication coverage is null as country town which has agricultural regions, an alternative for communication systems is a must. In addition, cattle safety and health are an increasing agenda in the technology scenario for rural applications. Therefore, this article will address the use of the LoRaWAN communication protocol, which benefit for being a low-cost technology in order to perform real-time cattle tracking in the field, where today cellular network coverage may be unavailable. For this, a prototype consisting of 2 devices is presented, a collar with GPS tracker, LoRa module and a battery for the first and a gateway based on the Heltec V2 module connected to the Wireless network. Cattle geolocation is sent every 30 seconds from the collar to the gateway, which is connected to The Things Network (TTN) which decodes bytes sent by the node analyzing the animal's position. With an integration between TTN and Node-Red, the geolocation is verified with a predetermined location radius. Triggering a message for telegram if an event occurs. Subsequently, the article focuses on describing the execution of all assembly and programming of the prototype, in addition to explain the LoRa protocol and its benefits for this use case. Finally, tests and results of communication efficiency, battery consumption and distance were performed in order to verify the power and durability of the system in a single battery charge. In the end, the prototype guarantees a reliable and low-cost solution for emerging countries.