CAREER: LoRa Enabled Space-air-ground Integrated Networks for Next-Generation Agricultural IoT

物联网(IoT)范式将在未来的精准农业中发挥关键作用，专注于提高作物产量和降低管理费用。具体地说，农业物联网通过促进室外环境中经济高效和能源高效的数据收集，在传统的依赖天气的农业决策和数据驱动的计算智能之间发挥了管道的作用。Long Range，或LORA，作为广域物联网框架出现，准备为农业物联网提供支持。尽管如此，为下一代农业物联网部署Lora遇到了障碍，原因是部署环境多样化、电力资源有限以及农村地区缺乏连接基础设施。该项目致力于为天空地一体化农业物联网设计奠定基础。本研究致力于建立一种新颖的基于LORA的网络架构，以培育可靠、可持续和泛在的农业物联网网络。该项目承诺提供细粒度的田间数据，以推动灌溉、疾病缓解和气候管理方面的进步。此外，它还为本科生和研究生提供关于农业物联网发展的教育材料。此外，它还为不同人口群体中代表性不足的学生提供研究培训机会。为了实现其目标，该项目开发了一个新的框架，用于在农业环境中跨土壤、超低能量和大规模部署物联网，总体目标是为精准农业建立可靠、可持续和无处不在的物联网基础设施。该项目包括三个主要组成部分：(I)设计新的天线配置，以增强地下传感器跨土壤通信的可靠性。(2)开发无电池、高通量的后向散射LORA标签，并利用无人机作为移动电源，以减少传感器节点的能源消耗。(3)开发农村地区LORA网关的替代回程，利用低地球轨道卫星的全球覆盖能力。通过与学术和工业合作伙伴的合作，该项目探索了拟议的农业物联网的各种应用，包括灌溉系统、水质管理、疾病控制和减少温室气体排放。在整个项目中产生的研究成果、源代码和数据集被公开与研究社区共享，以促进进一步的探索和进步。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm will assume a pivotal role in future precision agriculture, concentrating on enhancing crop yield and reducing management expenses. Specifically, agricultural IoT acts as a conduit between traditional weather-dependent agricultural decision-making and data-driven computational intelligence by facilitating cost-effective and energy-efficient data collection in outdoor environments. Long Range, or LoRa, emerges as a wide-area IoT framework poised to empower agricultural IoT. Nonetheless, deploying LoRa for next-generation agricultural IoT encounters obstacles due to the varied deployment settings, limited power resources, and absence of connectivity infrastructure in rural locales. This project endeavors to lay the groundwork for a space-air-ground integrated agricultural IoT design. The research endeavors to establish a novel LoRa-based network architecture to foster a reliable, sustainable, and ubiquitous agricultural IoT network. The project promises to furnish granular field data to propel advancements in irrigation, disease mitigation, and climate management. Furthermore, it furnishes educational materials on agricultural IoT development for undergraduate and graduate studies. Additionally, it provides research training opportunities for underrepresented students across diverse demographics.To achieve its objectives, the project develops a new framework for cross-soil, ultra-low-energy, and large-scale IoT deployment in agricultural settings, with the overarching aim of establishing a reliable, sustainable, and ubiquitous IoT infrastructure for precision agriculture. The project encompasses three primary components: (i) Design of novel antenna configurations to bolster the reliability of cross-soil communication for subterranean sensors. (ii) The development of battery-free, high-throughput backscatter LoRa tags and the utilization of drones as mobile power sources to mitigate energy consumption at sensor nodes. (iii) Development of an alternative backhaul for LoRa gateways in rural regions that leverage the global coverage capability of Low-Earth-Orbit satellites to. Through collaboration with academic and industrial partners, this project explores diverse applications of the proposed agricultural IoT, including irrigation systems, water quality management, disease control, and greenhouse gas reduction. The research outcomes, source code, and datasets generated throughout the project are openly shared with the research community to foster further exploration and advancement.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.