Application of LoRa Technology in ET based Irrigation of Village Parks

Abstract

The communication coverage of Long Range (LoRa) in a dense urban environment has not been much focused specifically in the Philippines. Long Range (LoRa) communication opened various possibilities for LPWAN communications, including Smart Irrigation solutions. A smart irrigation system involves water conservation in which controlled irrigation is practiced because it has medium water consumption. This paper presents the application of LoRa (abbreviation of Long Range) of an evapotranspiration based-irrigation (ET-based) system to meet the required volume of water of a turf. The system harnessed two sources of environmental data; (1) sensor nodes that collect temperature, soil moisture, water flow sensor, and (2) public weather forecast. These data will be stored in the raspberry pi data logger. The system is configured to calculate the reference evapotranspiration using the Penman-Monteith equation and the crop water requirement. Users can schedule the irrigation in the system; through LoRa communication, it can send a trigger signal along with the calculated water requirement to start the irrigation. The data is also sent to the ThingSpeak cloud for monitoring. This paper also presents the localization of the LoRa device in the remote stations to find the best position to set up the LoRa devices. Finally, the researchers presented how much water is saved through ET-based irrigation compared to manual irrigation.