Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Hierarchical LoRaMESH-Based Sensor Network with Wi-Fi HaLow Backhaul for Smart Agriculture

Large-scale smart agriculture requires reliable and energy-efficient wireless connectivity to support distributed environmental sensing across wide rural areas. However, existing low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies often face limitations in scalability, reliability, or infrastructure dependency when deployed in large agricultural fields. This study presents the design and experimental evaluation of a hierarchical sensor network architecture that integrates LoRaMESH for multi-hop sensing communication and Wi-Fi HaLow as a sub-GHz backhaul for data aggregation and cloud connectivity. In the proposed system, LoRaMESH forms intra-cluster sensor networks using a lightweight controlled flooding protocol, while Wi-Fi HaLow provides long-range IP-based connectivity between cluster gateways and a central access point. A real-world deployment covering approximately 2.5km×1km of agricultural area was implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. Experimental results show that the LoRaMESH network achieves packet delivery ratios above 90% across one to three hops, with average end-to-end delays between 10.6 s and 13.3 s. The Wi-Fi HaLow backhaul demonstrates high reliability within short to medium distances, reaching 99.5% packet delivery ratio at 50 m and 89.68% at 200 m. Energy measurements further indicate that the sensor nodes consume only 21.19μA in sleep mode, enabling long-term battery-powered operation suitable for agricultural monitoring applications. These results indicate that the proposed hierarchical architecture is a feasible connectivity option for the tested large-scale agricultural sensing scenario. Because no side-by-side LoRaWAN or NB-IoT benchmark was conducted on the same testbed, the results should be interpreted as a field validation of the proposed architecture rather than as a direct experimental demonstration of superiority over alternative LPWAN systems.