Radio frequency propagation, characterization and measurements for antenna sensor networks with applications in smart farming

Laburpena

The world’s population is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030. This implicates the need to increase agriculture production. This fact resulted in increased interest and research in smart agriculture to improve the crop quality, avoid production losses and optimize costs. In this context, this Thesis work presents a novel methodology to assess the performance of both Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) in smart agriculture. Concerning WSNs, this Thesis describes the importance of near-ground communications in agriculture, obtaining deterministic radio channel characterization and path loss modeling for near-ground communications in multiple agriculture fields by means of measurements and with an in-house developed 3D Ray Launching (3D RL) method. Moreover, the novelty of this work is completed with the assessment of a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) based system proposed for large-scale farm monitoring that interacts with agricultural vehicles and farmers under multiple scenarios and radio technologies. From the farm to the city, this work proposes deterministic radio channel characterization and end-to-end system validation for vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) communication, which can be extended to vehicle shipping of agriculture stock in urban scenarios, and also applied to botanical fields monitoring using multilevel radio technologies due to its similarity to the scenario of agriculture fields. Moreover, a novel hybrid simulation method utilizing the 3D-RL has been developed, based on the simulation validation, to obtain computational models for vegetation and urban scenarios. Finally, antennas with better radio performance for near-ground and V2X communications are designed based on the characterization obtained of the radio channels.