future internet Article Experimental Evaluation of a LoRa Wildlife Monitoring Network in a Forest Vegetation Area Mike Oluwatayo Ojo 1,2, * , Davide Adami 3 and Stefano Giordano 2   Citation: Ojo, M.O.; Adami, D.; Giordano, S. Experimental Evaluation of a LoRa Wildlife Monitoring Network in a Forest Vegetation Area. Future Internet 2021, 13, 115. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050115 Academic Editor: Gianluigi Ferrari Received: 12 April 2021 Accepted: 28 April 2021 Published: 29 April 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Veterinary Sciences, University of Turin, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy 2 Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Via Caruso 16, 56122 Pisa, Italy; s.giordano@iet.unipi.it 3 CNIT Research Unit, Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, 56100 Pisa, Italy; d.adami@iet.unipi.it * Correspondence: mikeoluwatayo.ojo@unito.it or mike.ojo@ing.unipi.it Abstract: Smart agriculture and wildlife monitoring are one of the recent trends of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which are evolving in providing sustainable solutions from producers. This article details the design, development and assessment of a wildlife monitoring application for IoT animal repelling devices that is able to cover large areas, thanks to the low power wide area networks (LPWAN), which bridge the gap between cellular technologies and short range wireless technologies. LoRa, the global de-facto LPWAN, continues to attract attention given its open specification and ready availability of off-the-shelf hardware, with claims of several kilometers of range in harsh challenging environments. At first, this article presents a survey of the LPWAN for smart agriculture applications. We proceed to evaluate the performance of LoRa transmission technology operating in the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, aimed at wildlife monitoring in a forest vegetation area. To characterize the communication link, we mainly use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Findings from this study show that achievable performance can greatly vary between the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, and prompt caution is required when taking numbers at face value, as this can have implications for IoT applications. In addition, our results show that the link reaches up to 860 m in the highly dense forest vegetation environment, while in the not so dense forest vegetation environment, it reaches up to 2050 m. Keywords: Internet of Things; smart agriculture; LoRa; LoRaWAN; LPWAN; 433 MHz; 868 MHz; wildlife; ungulates; NLOS; forest 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 destroy- ing 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 fenc- ing are sometimes inadequate, non-substantial, time-consuming and also expensive [4]. Some of these methods even have an environmental pollution effect on both humans and Future Internet 2021, 13, 115. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050115 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet