V5 LoRa Technology

SoilNet V5 LoRa uses the recently introduced LoRa (Longe Range) communication technology that enables long-range, low-power, low-bitrate wireless communication. While 2.4 GHz-based radio technology used in SoilNet V3 limits the communication range between sensor nodes to less than 1 km, LoRa offers network coverage of several kilometers with the same energy consumption at 868Mhz. To achieve this, LoRa relies on the Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation method, which makes data transmission more robust against interference.


LoRa uses a specific network protocol (LoRaWAN) which is a low-power wide-area network specification that uses star topologies with three different types of devices: LoRa nodes that can host a set of environmental sensors, a LoRa gateway and a LoRa network server. A key advantage of the star network topology used here compared to a mesh-network topology is that the end-devices do not have to listen for incoming messages and forward them, which saves a significant amount of power.