Reliable Data Transmission using Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) for Agricultural Applications Franz Kuntke kuntke@peasec.tu-darmstadt.de Technical University of Darmstadt Darmstadt, Germany Marcel Sinn sinnmarcel88@gmail.com Technical University of Darmstadt Darmstadt, Germany Christian Reuter reuter@peasec.tu-darmstadt.de Technical University of Darmstadt Darmstadt, Germany ABSTRACT Reliable IT-based communication in agriculture is becoming increas- ingly important for regular operations. For example, if a farmer is in the feld during a network outage, such as a failure of the mobile network, an alternative communication channel is needed to continue to connect to IT components and required data. With increasing digitalization, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies are being used more and more frequently, e.g. for sen- sor networks. The LPWAN technologies ofer a high range and can be used autonomously for the most part, but do not allow classic TCP/IP communication. In this work, a popular LPWAN technology, namely LoRaWAN, is experimentally supplemented by AX.25 on OSI layer 2 (Data Link Layer) to allow end devices TCP/IP-based communication over long distances. The evaluation shows that classic low-bandwidth applications are thus functional and can enable reliable, crisis-capable data transmission. CCS CONCEPTS · Computer systems organization → Embedded systems; Re- dundancy; Robotics; · Networks → Network reliability. KEYWORDS redundant data transmission, reliable wireless channel, LPWAN, LoRa, agricultural application ACM Reference Format: Franz Kuntke, Marcel Sinn, and Christian Reuter. 2021. Reliable Data Trans- mission using Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) for Agricultural Applications. In The 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2021), August 17ś20, 2021, Vienna, Austria. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3465481.3469191 1 INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTION Digitalization is now more than ever permeating all areas of the life of modern people. Smart Home is a familiar concept for ev- eryone, ranging from the smart cofee machine to the smart door lock. But also industry sectors, including critical infrastructures, like agriculture, become more complex and interconnected through Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. ARES 2021, August 17ś20, 2021, Vienna, Austria © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9051-4/21/08. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3465481.3469191 digitalization [21] . In order to make agricultural systems intelligent, techniques from the felds of ‘machine learning’ [24] and ‘big data’ are also used to further support farmers and autonomous systems [42]. The objective of smart farming is to emancipate from station- ary control and monitoring systems of a farm. Control interfaces are now available on common end devices such as smartphones [37] and tablets. This makes it possible to perform everyday tasks remotely. Also common to almost all processes and techniques, regardless of the type of application, is that they require a commu- nication channel for the purpose of signal or data transmission. For regular operations in agriculture, communication with other actors is necessary, which, as described, increasingly takes place via digital channels [23]. A product research of diferent large manufacturers has shown that the available (relevant) possibilities are currently the following: mobile radio, LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth, satellite, pro- prietary radio solutions, USB, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT. ‘Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT)’ and ‘Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN)’ belong to the so-called ‘Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)’ [14]. LPWAN are diferent radio technologies that aim to work using as little energy and as cost- efcient as possible while at the same time trying to maximize the radio range. They are often used in the IoT sector [3], where it is important to connect the highest possible number of devices. The aforementioned characteristics also predestine LPWANs for agriculture, where large arable land, livestock pastures, or stables exist. This is particularly evident in countries with huge farming areas such as China, the USA, or Australia. Despite all the benefts for humans, animals, and the environ- ment, smart farming also brings challenges [4]. Given the current dependence of agriculture on digitalization, an outage of technol- ogy can potentially cause great damage. For example, the barn climate has a direct infuence on the health of the animals [38], so an outage of the air-conditioning system is considered critical. The ‘Federal Ministry of the Interior, Germany (BMI)’ in 2016 issued an ordinance [7], which lists, among others, the sectors energy, water, information technology, and telecommunications as critical infrastructures. Of particular note is the inclusion of the food sector. This encompasses agricultural companies, which, according to the ordinance, are particularly worthy of protection. To an increasing degree, the focus it hence put on implementing interconnectedness along the food supply chain in a crisis-proof manner [28]. This is refected in current research approaches [35], which support the idea of making smart farming resilient. However, crises do not have to have the scale of a war or a nationwide environmental disaster to cause damage to agriculture and industry. Scenarios such as the outage (of parts) of the Internet or local emergencies also have signifcant potential to cause major