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

物联网（IoT）模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。具体而言，农业物联网通过促进户外环境中具有成本效益和能源效率的数据收集，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充当管道。Long Range，或LoRa，作为一个广域物联网框架出现，有望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，原因是部署设置不同，电力资源有限，以及农村地区缺乏连接基础设施。该项目致力于为空-空-地一体化农业物联网设计奠定基础。该研究致力于建立一种基于LoRa的新型网络架构，以促进可靠，可持续和无处不在的农业物联网网络。该项目承诺提供颗粒状的现场数据，以推动灌溉，疾病缓解和气候管理的进步。此外，它还为本科生和研究生学习提供有关农业物联网发展的教育材料。为了实现其目标，该项目为农业环境中的跨土壤、超低能耗和大规模物联网部署开发了一个新的框架，其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：（一）设计新型天线配置，以加强地下传感器跨土壤通信的可靠性。(ii)开发无电池、高吞吐量的反向散射LoRa标签，并利用无人机作为移动的电源，以减少传感器节点的能耗。(iii)为农村地区的LoRa网关开发替代回程，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，疾病控制和温室气体减排。整个项目中生成的研究成果、源代码和数据集与研究界公开共享，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知识价值和更广泛的知识价值进行评估，被认为值得支持影响审查标准。

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.