Energy-Aware LoRaWAN Design for Long-Lived Agricultural Sensing: Insights from a Multi-Year Deployment and Controlled Platform Comparison
Abstract: Agricultural IoT nodes are often far from mains power and have limited access for maintenance. Therefore, IoT deployments benefit from low-power, long-range communication such as LoRaWAN. However, communication alone does not guarantee multi-year operation. Previous work has measured communication energy, modelled system lifetime, and documented long-lived deployments. This paper connects long-term deployment evidence with controlled platform measurements. The AgriTrust deployment has operated for 2 years and 8 months using MKR WAN1310-based Squirrel Box nodes. Building on this evidence, we compared the MKR WAN1310 and STM32WL LoRaWAN platforms using time-resolved current traces during confirmed-uplink cycles. For this outdoor comparison, we tested nine combinations of payload size and data rate with three repetitions each. Both platforms achieved 3/3 ACKed packets in every condition. The STM32WL had lower cycle energy than the WAN1310 in all tested conditions. Cycle energy ranged from 0.0350 J to 0.3550 J for STM32WL and from 0.0698 J to 0.5662 J for WAN1310. These communication events are brief, while sleep and leakage currents persist between cycles. The STM32WL sleep current was recorded at 59.6 nA, while the WAN1310 sleep current was 104 microamperes, approximately 1745 times that of the STM32WL. This difference shows that sleep current is a first-order determinant of long-term viability. However, the whole-system energy budget also depends on sensing loads, duty cycle, communication energy, and harvested-energy support. The study should be treated as a controlled characterisation, not a universal comparison across all sites, firmware stacks, or LoRaWAN modes.