IEEE 802.15.4 Air-Ground UAV Communications in Smart Farming Scenarios

Smart farming is one of the most promising applications showing the benefits of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Thus, precision agriculture in rural areas may largely benefit from low-cost and easy-to-deploy vehicles able to exchange data with ground sensors for monitoring and controlling automated cultivations. In this letter, we describe, both analytically and empirically, a real testbed implementing IEEE 802.15.4-based communications between an UAV and fixed ground sensors. In our scenario, we found that aerial mobility limits the actual IEEE 802.15.4 transmission range among the UAV and the ground nodes to approximately 1/3 of the nominal one. We also provide considerations to design the deployment of sensors in precision agriculture scenarios.