MakerSpace

Build a Long-Range Sensor Network with ChirpStack Sensor Symphony

- By Koen Vervloesem

ChirpStack's LoRaWAN implementation lets you set up long-range wireless traffic for sensors even if you are far from a WiFi access point.

If you have sensors in your house, there are many technologies that you can use to transmit their measurements wirelessly: Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and even WiFi. However, they all have a limited range. For sensors in your garden, the distance may be just too far. Moreover, for many applications, these technologies are too powerful: They offer much more bandwidth than you need. For monitoring the level of your rainwater tank or the temperature and humidity in your greenhouse, you only need to send a couple of bytes every few minutes.

Networks optimized for these situations are called low-power wide area networks (LPWAN). One such technology is LoRaWAN: It implements wireless communication over longer distances (even exceeding 10km in optimal conditions) with minimal power consumption. The tradeoff is that the data transmission rate is low, limited to a few kilobits per second at most, but that's good enough for garden sensors. The same applies to measurements in farms, vineyards, and many other large areas. By sending a small packet with sensor values every 10 minutes, a LoRaWAN sensor can operate for up to 10 years on a single battery.

In this article, I'll show you how to set up long-range communication in your home. But before getting started, I need to define some basic terminology.

LoRa and LoRaWAN