Wide-Area Wildlife Tracking
A LoRa-based wireless mesh network architecture for long-range, low-power and high-fidelity wildlife tracking and monitoring systems.
A LoRa-based wireless mesh network architecture for long-range, low-power and high-fidelity wildlife tracking and monitoring systems.
The Challenge
Traditional tracking and monitoring systems come with their limitations in a multitude of terrains and ecosystems. Having them be solely dependent upon GPS and Cellular technologies can get expensive when scaling up. This is made worse by power limitations which so far has forced tracking system designers to resort to low-resolution trails.
Developments
Our work utilises a Mesh network configuration on LoRa technology, giving way to long-range tracking while quite literally sipping on power. Due to LoRa’s low power requirements, the coordinates can be logged more often, allowing for high-resolution trails with the option to log other climatic/environmental or biological metrics. As the reliance on is minimised, associated long-term costs are negligible.
Typical LoRaWAN supports single-hop links, however, our system supports multi-hop links using the same license-free sub-gigahertz radio . Since latency isn’t of concern in these applications, low-bandwidth presents no practical problem. Our system is configurable in three modes:
- Mode A: Backbone Mesh – Gateways form a Mesh
- Mode B: Nodal Mesh – Nodes form a Mesh
- Mode C: Hybrid Mesh – Both Gateways and Nodes form a Mesh
15
10
5
* For each link/hop
† From any gateway
My Role
I co-headed a research team at NITW along with Mr Jithu Panicker; my responsibilities included design of the LoRa Mesh Network and the link configuration.
The Team
The team included three alumni of NIT Warangal, and we had received valuable support from the team at Tactical Advantage, an anti-poaching consultancy firm from Zimbabwe.
Status
Our work was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies in 2019, following which it was published by IEEE and can be found here.
My Role
I co-headed a research team at NITW along with Mr Jithu Panicker; my responsibilities included design of the LoRa Mesh Network and the link configuration.
The Team
The team included three alumni of NIT Warangal, and we had received valuable support from the team at Tactical Advantage, an anti-poaching consultancy firm from Zimbabwe.
Status
Our work was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies in 2019, following which it was published by IEEE and can be found here.