SpaceSheep: satellite communications for smart agriculture scenarios

• Autor(a) principal: Rainho, Raquel Andrade
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/34980
• topic: Smart agriculture; Internet of things; Satellite communications; Serialization formats

The need to increase productivity in daily activities has been contributing to the development of new systems that can optimize those tasks. Within the agricultural sector, IoT solutions are allowing the autonomous monitoring of crops and animals, reducing human effort and, consequently, the cost of the final product. One of those solutions was developed under the scope of the SheepIT project, which is an animal monitoring system developed to remove weeds in vineyards by controlling the behaviour of herds. To do so, each animal is equiped with a sensorand actuator-based device (collar), which monitors and conditions its actions. The information these devices collect is periodically forwarded to an aggregator node (gateway) through fixed nodes spread around the pasture area (beacon), where is then processed and uploaded to a remote computational platform via the Internet. However, these animals typically move around extensive areas with poor or non-existent ground network coverage, which inhibits the proper communications operation of such system. This work aimed to mitigate the common lack of coverage in rural areas. To do so, a satellite communications interface was integrated into the SheepIT project and, consequently, the messages exchanged by the system were adapted and optimized to meet the constraints of this new technology. These modifications extend the SheepIT project to be able to operate in scenarios where ground network coverage is not available.