LoRa Crowdsensing project that Team Reach has created is aimed at increasing connectivity. Up until this point, this team has created multiple documents that outlined the plans that we had for our product and also explained the progress that was being made on the project . This final design review will provide an in-depth review of what was completed in order to bring you our final product and how successful we believe the final product is.
Our final product connects to end devices over bluetooth or wifi and then the LoRa node will obtain the data from the end devices. The node, which is battery powered, will then send this data to the gateway. From the gateway, the data will be forwarded to the server. The server for this project is The Things Network (TTN) which is widely used for LoRa applications.
Team Reach is happy to have been chosen for this project. Dr. Vigil-Hayes and the Community Aware Networks and Information Systems (CANIS) Lab have shown that there is a need for this product. The LoRa Crowdsensing project will increase connectivity in more remote areas that do not have an infrastructure to collect all the data being generated already. Throughout the last two semesters this team has been working to create an easy, plug and play, way to connect to the LoRa network via bluetooth or wifi capabilities. Some of the other key features of our design are power efficiency, long range connections, and the ability to be used for many different applications.
The LoRa Crowdsensing project has become more relevant with the increased usage of smartphones. About 81% of adults in the United States own a smartphone. The widespread use of smart devices has led to the mobile crowdsensing (MCS) phenomenon. MCS is when large groups of people with mobile devices sense, compute, and collectively share data. This data can be used to measure, map, analyze, and infer processes that may be of interest.
However, not everywhere has the infrastructure in place to make this data collection possible. Dr. Vigil-Hayes came up with the LoRa Crowdsensing project with the hopes that it would create a way to collect data in more remote areas or areas that do not have the proper infrastructure in place. The main focus of the LoRa Crowdsensing project is to increase connectivity using LoRa technology.
LoRa stands for long range and it is a type of low-powered wide area network. There are a few benefits to using LoRa for this project. As stated before it uses little power, it also utilizes a low bandwidth, and can span an area of 10-15 km. The Reach team was asked to take advantage of LoRa technology in order to enable plug and play capabilities by using a bluetooth or wifi connection. In the end, our client should be able to connect any end device to our network easily and this data should be forwarded through the LoRa network to a server. The network should be able to handle both event driven and continuous data collection and be able to last in the field for at least 6 months at a time. Various end devices should be able to connect to the network so that even in more remote locations data can be collected for numerous different applications.