# Experimental Evaluation of a LoRa Wildlife Monitoring Network in a Forest Vegetation Area
## 1 Introduction  
With the rapid increase in the population of ungulates, especially wild boars (_Sus scrofa_ L.) in Italy emanating due to the migration from the Alps to the southern part of the country, it ungulates destroying crop produce such as vineyards, wheat, and corn fields, as well as causing plant mortality [1, 2]. Statistical data also show that there has been a massive surge in the loss of wine production, due to the crop damage caused by wildlife attacks in the past 3 decades. The annual production loss in the wine industry in Italy is estimated to be 13 million euros, with an annual cost to the government estimated around 3 million euro [3], thus the ability to remotely monitor wildlife and protect crop produce has become an important necessity. Considering the above, several ways have been used to keep ungulates from destroying crop products, which can be classified as lethal or non-lethal. Lethal ways, such as shooting, trapping, string and stone, are very cruel and not environmentally friendly, while non-lethal means, such as scarecrow, chemical repellents, organic substances, and fencing are sometimes inadequate, non-substantial, time-consuming and also expensive [4]. Some of these methods even have an environmental pollution effect on both humans andungulates [5]. Technology assistance at various stages of the agricultural processes can significantly enhance the crop yield [6]. In this context, the usage of ad-hoc IoT devices (also called repellers, see Section 3.1 for details) capable of detecting the presence of animals by means of a PIR sensor, and repelling them through the generation of ultrasounds, has been designed and evaluated in our previous work in [7]. This has recently been proven as an alternative, effective method for protecting crops against ungulates. Such a solution, besides being non-lethal, has no impact on the landscape and no limitation on tourists' and bikers movements, which is very relevant for tourism. Our proposed method for protecting crops from ungulate attacks is based on the generation of ultrasounds and the utilization of IoT technology for building a system with repelling and monitoring capabilities. In terms of the communication technology, there have been various breakthroughs in technology that are suitable for various types of applications. Focusing on our application, one of the key requirements is that the repeller devices consume very little power with a low data rate service. Low-power wide area networks (LPWAN) technologies promise minimal power consumption and long ranges, while allowing the reuse of frequencies of legacy communication networks. Although cellular standards have continued to evolve (such as long term evolution machine type communications (LTE-M), narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) and the upcoming 5G massive machine type communications (mMTC) and ultra reliable MTC (uMTC)) to cater to the needs of IoT applications, a forecast from IoT Analytics [8] estimates that more than 2 billion devices will be connected through LPWAN technologies by the year 2025. At present, there are many players in the LPWAN space, such as Long Range (LoRa) [9; 10], Sigfox [11], Ingenu [12] and Weightless [13]. Among others, LoRa has gained more popularity from the industrial and academic community due to the openness of its specification and ready availability of hardware in the market, which can facilitate experimental research and rapid prototyping. While LoRa is a physical (PHY) layer specification, LoRaWAN is the medium access control (MAC) defined to be used on top of the aforementioned PHY, where many research works have shown their advantages in terms of scalability, coverage and energy efficiency [14]. Among different and various wireless technologies for the IoT, in this solution, we adopt LoRa and LoRaWAN, global de facto standards of low-power wide area networks (LPWAN). LoRa and LoRaWAN are gaining significant interest and positive momentum thanks to their excellent features in covering long distances and in large scaling with low cost.