Search

When urban agriculture is addressed at a family scale, known as urban gardening, it is assumed as a non-commercial activity where some family members voluntarily take care of the plantation during their free time. If technology is going to be used to support such a process, then the solutions should consider the particularities of these gardeners (e.g., life dynamics and culture) to make them adoptable. The literature reports several urban agriculture experiences in Western countries and Southeast Asia; however, this activity has been poorly explored in South American countries, particularly at a family scale and considering the culture and the affordability of the solutions. This article presents an experience report of urban gardening in Peru, where a prototype of an IoT system and a mobile application were conceived, implemented, and used to support the gardening of vegetables at a family scale, considering the cultural aspects of the gardeners. This experience obtained positive results in terms of tomato production, mainly showing the system’s capability to self-adapt its behavior to consider the cultivation conditions of these urban gardeners. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first IoT system that can be iteratively adjust its behavior to improve the chances of being adopted by a particular end-user population (i.e., gardeners).

LoRaWAN is a long range and low power protocol devised for connecting devices under the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This protocol was not conceived to support real-time message delivery; therefore, it is not always feasible using it to support IoT solutions involving large wireless sensors networks and time constraint messaging, e.g., in early warning systems for natural hazards, remote monitoring of industrial machinery or autonomous control of transportation systems. This paper presents a model that provides certainty, at the design time of IoT systems, about the real-time communication capability of their supporting network. It allows solution designers: (1) to decide if developing or not a real-time IoT solution based on the feasibility of its communication infrastructure, and (2) to improve the communication infrastructure to try making real-time communication feasible using LoRaWAN.

LoRaWAN has become the most widely used low-power wide-area network technology to implement monitoring solutions based on the Internet of remote things (IoRT) paradigm. Typically, these solutions interconnect remote sensing areas and data processing infrastructure located in urban centers. The operation expenses of these solutions depend mainly on the traffic sent through the network backhaul, i.e., the link that connects the remote sensing area and the urban area where the data are usually processed and stored. This service is provided by telecommunication companies and represents the main operation cost of IoRT solutions. These expenses usually limit the affordability of IoRT-based systems in developing countries, and also in scenarios where the operational cost is an issue to address. This paper presents an extension to the LoRaWAN protocol, named Node-Aware-LoRaWAN (NA-LoRaWAN), that reduces the traffic in the backhaul, thus decreasing the operational expenses of IoRT-based systems. In order to evaluate the performance of NA-LoRaWAN, it was compared to a regular LoRaWAN implementation. Depending on the network scenario, the proposed extension reduced the traffic through the backhaul in the range of 12–34%. This extension opens several opportunities to use IoRT solutions in application domains with a low operational budget, e.g., precision agriculture, environmental monitoring and natural hazards’ early detection.