EVALUATING LORAWAN ADAPTIVE DATA RATE EFFECTIVENESS IN HETEROGENOUS SMART FARMING CONDITIONS

• O. A. Agbolade

  Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria

The long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) has become popular in modern environmental sensing applications particularly in areas with limited cellular infrastructure. However, the deployment of this system has been restricted to homogeneous applications largely due to their inherent restrictions like collision and use of unlicensed bands. To mitigate these limitations, LoRaWAN employ the adaptive data rate (ADR) optimization technique to improve the reliability of LoRaWAN deployments. While ADR performance in homogeneous applications and been well study with acceptable results, there has been limited studies aimed at the performance of LoRaWAN in heterogeneous applications. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the effectiveness of ADR for optimizing transmission parameters in heterogeneous environments with varying priority levels under concurrent transmission scenarios. The study evaluated the impact of ADR on key performance metrics such as packet delivery rate (PDR), energy consumption, and network range. The research findings revealed that ADR performs well under high-frequency, mobile conditions as exhibited by livestock trackers. This resulted in significant reductions in transmit power and spreading factor over time. However, static and infrequently transmitting nodes, such as soil moisture and temperature sensors, experienced limited ADR convergence, leading to suboptimal transmission efficiency and increased energy consumption. The findings underscore the limitations of uniform ADR policies and highlight the need for context-aware adaptations in heterogeneous deployments. This work contributes new insights into performance trade-offs in LoRaWAN-based smart farming and lays the groundwork for developing intelligent ADR strategies that consider application-specific dynamics to enhance reliability, energy efficiency, and network scalability.

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