Hardware Development and Evaluation of Multihop Cluster-Based Agricultural IoT Based on Bluetooth Low-Energy and LoRa Communication Technologies  
[PERSON]  
1 Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Mines and Technology,  
Fortunately, wireless sensor network-based agricultural Internet of Things (WSN-based Agri-IoT) technology has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing resource optimization, remote monitoring, and farm automation. This technology utilizes sampled data on micro-climatic parameters, physical conditions, livestock locations and conditions, and farm activities through diverse wirelessly connected electronic devices (known as sensor nodes (SNs)), systems, and platforms. Agri-IoT technology not only facilitates the management of farming processes, resources, and remote control (i.e., farm automation) but also improves crop quality and production capacity by ensuring that resources such as water, fertilizers, and pesticides are applied at optimal times and under appropriate environmental conditions [4; 5; 8]. This situation necessitates a paradigm shift in agricultural practices in Africa. The most promising solution must be a robust, affordable, autonomous, and contextually relevant Agri-IoT technology that meets the critical design expectations illustrated in Figure 1.  
Currently, the benchmarking Agri-IoT testbed solutions referenced in [3; 5; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16], as depicted in Figure 2b, rely on fixed support systems (such as wired sensor networks, servers, and gateway backbones), intricate event-routing architectures/protocols, and costly communication technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi/Wi-Fi-cellular communication technologies) for sensor network communication. These factors render them expensive, location-restricted, energy-inefficient, and overly complex for non-experts and smallholder farmers, who represent over two-thirds of the economically active global population [2; 6]. Furthermore, many of these solutions have been validated under indoor conditions [17; 18; 19; 20], making their performance indicators less applicable for real-world assessment [3; 31]. Although some testbeds operate in outdoor settings [3; 5; 14; 15], their setup and management via centralized or flooding-based routing protocols with wired backbones are often time-consuming, location-constrained, and capital-intensive, especially as the network and SN count increase. Moreover, these solutions typically require on-farm electricity and internet access, which are generally unavailable in many African regions. Consequently, a significant gap remains between the theoretical design of these technologies and their practical performance in real-world settings. Although cluster-based Agri-IoT implementations using multihop architectures [32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37] and emerging low-power, wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) and LoRa have demonstrated significant potential to address the technical challenges associated with WSN-based Agri-IoT [4; 8; 38], they have not been adequately explored in real-world testbed implementations and hardware evaluations due to several technical challenges:  
* There is a lack of robust, low-power, flexible, location-independent, low-cost, and stable real-world testbed architectural frameworks for multihop cluster-based Agri-IoT (MCA-IoT) that utilize freely available, low-power wireless communication standards such as BLE and LoRa. Such frameworks are needed to facilitate the easy deployment and wireless management of networks without relying on expensive fixed infrastructure. Figure 1: Generalized design expectations of a globally significant Agri-IoT technology [9; 10]. ture. Despite substantial research in this domain, many solutions remain prohibitively costly and impractical for small-scale farms [20].