# Leveraging LoRaWAN Technology for Precision Agriculture in Greenhouses
Recently, a case study has been done for PA using a LoRaWAN network for viticulture and greenhouses [16; 17], and a more specific micro use case like smart irrigation [18]. It specifically highlights the importance of accurate readings from sensors in a greenhouse along with a requirement for better data visualization and analysis. This paper describes the development and deployment of the LoRaWAN network to monitor environmental conditions in a greenhouse. This system is deployed at the research center Hoogstraten, which is in the north of the province of Antwerp, Belgium. It has multiple greenhouses; our research was conducted in a greenhouse with tomato crops. Deployed sensor network monitors environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide (CO\({}_{2}\)), electrical conductivity (EC) and illuminance. These sensors are battery operated and use private LoRaWAN network to forward the data to a gateway that is installed at the research center. This data is used by the biologists in the project (KU Leuven and University of Antwerp, Belgium) to develop crop models and perform disease prediction. Also, this data is helpful for the technicians in the greenhouse to monitor the growth of tomato. The sensor data is visualized on our customized ThingsBoard dashboard. The deployment was done in three phases to understand the impact of different sensor box designs in reading sensor values. These boxes are necessary to protect the sensors against adversary weather conditions and from regular spray inside the greenhouse [19]. Initially, we deployed off the shelf sensors and mounted inside the normal strawberry boxes which got affected due to daily spray. The second round, we deployed sensors inside in house designed box. This was again not giving the correct sensor values due to temperature difference inside the enclosed box, with limited airflow. Lastly, we built our customized airflow boxes which had proper air circulation to achieve the correct measurement of sensor values. The main contribution of this paper is three-fold. First, this paper summarizes the prospects and challenges for precision agriculture in greenhouses, along with salient considerations (learning from our experiment) for WSN deployment in the greenhouse. Also, we propose the successive steps to be followed for optimal WSN deployment in the greenhouse. Second, this paper illustrates the \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline \hline
**Heterogeneous Sensors and Control Systems** & **Facilitation** \\ \hline Environmental control system & Heating, cooling, ventilation and crop monitoring \\ Illuminance sensors & Light monitoring for plant growth \\ Tag-based sensors & Tracking and remote identification \\ Multimedia sensors & Remote image capturing (insect and plant disease) \\ Climate sensors & Monitoring, models for prediction and early warnings \\ Ground sensors & Equipment control and knowledge mining \\ Radiation sensors & Reasoning and analytic \\ Weather stations & Controlled environment agriculture \\ Decision support system (DSS) & Inter-operability, grower specific semantic annotation \\ Access control sensors & Unauthorized entry into the facility \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Leveraging divergent sensors and control systems for PA in greenhouse. importance of the design scheme of a sensor box to get the accurate sensor readings. This is achieved by using the airflow box as sensor enclosures in the greenhouse. Third, we show our end-to-end LoRaWAN-based WSN system for greenhouse monitoring, along with power analysis of LoRaWAN communication and our data visualization dashboard using ThingsBoard. The rest of the paper is organized in the following way. Section 2, describes the current state of the art for precision agriculture in greenhouses. The evolution of energy-efficient WSNs and its integration with LPWAN in the context of PA. Section 3, explains the system architecture along with material, methods and sensor deployment used for the current setup in the greenhouse.