LoRa-MQTT Gateway Device for Supporting Sensor-to-Cloud Data Transmission in Smart Aquaculture IoT Application

One of many services that could be developed with IoT technology and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a smart aquaculture service. In order to establish the smart aquaculture service, in previous research we developed a sensor node equipped with LoRa communication module to observe several physical parameters of the aquaculture water including acidity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity and temperature level. As the number of collected data growth, an integration between the WSN and cloud based computing platform is required to handle the storage and processing of those collected data. One of the challenges faced in that integration is a limited LoRa communication module which is expected to be able to send sensor data directly to the cloud platform. Therefore, a gateway device which is able to act as a bridge between sensor node devices and cloud platform is required. This research proposes the design of LoRa-MQTT gateway device for supporting the sensor-to-cloud data transmission in smart aquaculture IoT application. In its main functionality, the gateway device receives collected sensor from sensor device using LoRa communication module, build a message and transmit them to the cloud based data storage server using MQTT protocol. From the functional and performance testing, the gateway can perform as a communication connector between sensor nodes and cloud based entity using both LoRa and MQTT protocols with reasonable performance.