부산대학교 도서관

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the creation of new solutions to real-world problems, including digitalization and real-time monitoring. Plenty of research has been done in applying IoT schemes in various areas, such as Industry 4.0, smart cities or, as in the case of this paper, smart agriculture. One of the main problems in rural areas is the Internet coverage. In many cases, the infrastructure is very poor, and mountainous terrain further complicates the communication among devices. In this paper, we develop an IoT framework based on the Long Range (LoRa) wireless technology, specially designed to solve this issue (i.e., the lack of communication coverage). In particular, we have endowed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with a LoRa gateway to improve the coverage of LoRa devices in mountainous regions. Our experiments show that not only the distance between sender and receiver but also both the height of the UAV and the Fresnel zone clearance are critical factors for communications performance in mountainous areas.