LoRa Wireless Mesh Network for Lake Biology Study

Abstract

The LoRa Wireless Mesh Network was developed to collect lake health data and to make the data readily accessible to researchers or other individuals who wish to study or monitor lake health. This project will include buoys which are deployed as nodes at key locations on a lake, such as in bays or other low traffic monitoring points. Each node includes a LoRa Arduino board capable of wireless communication on the 915 MHz LoRa band and four different sensors (temperature, turbidity, DO2, and pH). Each node collects sensor data and passes it from node to node until it reaches the hub node. The hub node will store that data and upload it to an online dashboard, segregated by node location, where it may be presented graphically. The focus of his project is to utilize a mesh network to pass data from node to node without data loss over long distances and without line-of-site. Initially, data communications were established between two nodes. The network was then subsequently expanded through the inclusion of additional data source nodes and finally the hub node. The result is that sensor data can be collected and transmitted from each of the nodes at defined intervals and the network protocol will drop duplicate data transmissions to reduce network congestion. This provides an expandable and dependable node-based mesh network which enables real-time lake health monitoring capability, replacing current labor and time intensive manual measurements. The resulting data set will be valuable to biologists and ecologists conducting limnological research.