Yamini Swetha Nadella Master’s Thesis Defense, Monday, December 1, 2025 @ 1:00 pm Central Time

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Annamalai Annamalai

TITLE: DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF LOW-COST LORA MESH NETWORK FOR RELIABLE AND SECURED PRECISION AGRICULTURE

ABSTRACT: Rural precision agriculture requires reliable, low-cost, and energy-efficient communication systems capable of covering large farmland areas. Traditional wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite communication, are either expensive, consuming too much power, or even unreliable in maintaining connectivity in large farmlands, which is a common case in rural precision agriculture. LoRa-based network supports long-range communication along with extremely low power consumption, making it an appropriate solution for rural farmland area applications for precision agriculture. Current LoRaWAN systems have a star topology, which is also a limitation in offering efficient, multi-hop connectivity in rural environments. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a five-node LoRa mesh network for precision agriculture, utilizing ESP32 microcontrollers, RFM95 LoRa transceivers, GPS modules, and a suite of soil and environmental sensors, interfaced to Tago.io’s cloud-based platform for data analysis and visualization. Experimental results from controlled tests demonstrate a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of 96.8% and an average end-to-end latency of approximately 2 seconds, validating the network’s reliability and efficiency during multi-hop operation. Additionally, this study evaluated the mesh network’s performance with respect to payload-level integrity. Controlled bit flip attacks and character-level corruption tests indicate that, while GPS systems are protected from bit-level data corruption at physical layer through efficient CRC verification, undetected character-level payload corruption at the network layer can occur. Such corruption may cause significant GPS shifts and variations in sensor values without triggering any alarms. This is an area in precision agriculture using LoRa communication that has barely been explored for potential threats to data integrity. This work proves that low-cost mesh LoRa solutions for wireless communication can be effectively used to extend trustworthy coverage for sensors, as well as explore key issues of data integrity for implementing trustworthy, smart farmland systems.

Keywords: Precision agriculture, wireless sensor networks, LoRa mesh networks, data integrity

Room Location: Electrical Engineering Conference Room 315D