Feasibility of Solar-Powered LoRaWAN Sensor Nodes in Tropical Countries

With the proliferation of Internet of Things, a plethora of battery-powered sensor nodes are being deployed in outdoor spaces. With these soaring numbers, it has become an impractical task to replace their batteries in a year or so in operation. Therefore, it is essential to design sensor nodes that can run without battery replacement for a long time. Hence, being able to harvest power from the surrounding provides a sustainable solution. Especially, tropical countries receive an abundance of solar power throughout the year, which makes it a highly viable candidate to power the sensor nodes. Therefore, this paper presents a sensor node design that has specifically taken the solar power harvesting in tropical climates into consideration. The presented sensor node uses LoRaWAN technology for communication and the experimental work proves that a day’s solar energy harvest is enough to run the node for a several days when the battery capacity is carefully selected. Further, the study emphasizes the effects of cloudy/rainy days on the energy harvesting.