Diseño de un sistema de monitoreo de fuentes hídricas basado en tecnología LoRa para el sitio Tres Lagunas del cantón Saraguro

Abstract

Climate change's effects and anthropic interventions are the most relevant factors that put the natural conservation of high mountain lagoons (moorland) at risk. In this context, these bodies of water are very fragile and vulnerable ecosystems, conditioned by physicochemical variations that influence biological and ecological conditions. In this sense, the following project presents the design of a water source monitoring system based on LoRa technology for the Tres Lagunas moorland ecosystem (Ecuador). The solution has been implemented by using mainly an ATmega1284P microcontroller, an SX1278 transceiver and hydrological sensors, embedded on a printed circuit board (PCB). Data is transmitted from the study site to The Things Network (TTN) server and sent via the MQTT protocol to the Node-RED platform. On the other hand, a graphic interface has been developed that allows analyzing the historical data of temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) and hydrogen potential (pH). In addition, energy consumption tests and physical layer experiments have been carried out using LoRa with the prototype. The results reveal an adequate functioning of the prototype, and indicate that it can be installed in field for a period of 8 days powered by a PowerBank. In particular, as for the Spreading Factor (SF), it has been observed that SF9 and SF10 present on average packet reception rates higher than 97% at distances of approximately 1 km. In relation to SF7 and SF8, they were discarded for this type of settings due to the packet loss rate greater than 10%. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a portable, low-cost and open source prototype that focuses on the transmission of physicochemical data obtained in Andean moorland lagoons through IoT technologies for the administration, management and control of the water resources.