LoRa-based Visual Monitoring Scheme for Agriculture IoT

LoRa is a low-power wide-range wireless networking technology suitable for low-rate long-range applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). For example in the agriculture industry, LoRa-based environmental sensing system enables farmers to remotely monitor the status of a large farm in near real-time. However, there had been only a few explorations to transfer multimedia data such as images or video using LoRa because of its low data rate and restricted bandwidth. To this end, we introduce a novel system to transmit continuous images taken from a camera on a static environment through LoRa. The key challenge is to reduce the amount of transmitted data while preserving the image quality and the quality of service delivered to the application. We develop a technique that splits image to grid patches, and transmits only the modified area of an image based on their dissimilarity measure. We implement and evaluate our scheme on a real LoRa device to show its performance and image quality.