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Projecte llegit

Títol: Development of a drone-based miniaturized payload for LoRa communications experiment proof-of-concept

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: PARK, HYUK

Departament: FIS

Títol: Development of a drone-based miniaturized payload for LoRa communications experiment proof-of-concept

Data inici oferta: 18-02-2022     Data finalització oferta: 18-10-2022


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Nom del segon director/a (UPC): Lara Fernandez, Adrian Perez
Departament 2n director/a:
 
Paraules clau:
IoT, LoRa, CubeSat, LPWAN, MAC protocols, ALOHA, CSMA
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
The intern will become a member of NanosatLab, the UPC
nanosatellite laboratory. The team is currently working on the
CubeCat-6 (RITA), where the intern will be working in the
development of the LoRa communication experiment to later test it
in a measurement campaign. In particular, the project will
consist in two main parts. On the one hand, the assembly of the
mechanical interface of LoRa in the drone. On the other hand,
ground sensors, which are composed of two sensors and a LoRa
module with an arduino. In them it will be necessary to develop
software to read data from the sensors and to transmit and
receive packages. Finally, the implementation of the system on a
quadcopter and the planning of a measure campaign to prove the
operativity of the system.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
The remote sensing and interference detector with RadIometry and vegeTation Analysis (RITA), is a payload of 1U that will fly onboard Alainsat-1 a 3U CubeSat. Among other tests and experiments, it will perform a proof of concept of a LoRa custom module for space-to-Earth communications between the satellite and a terrestrial network of Internet of Things sensors.

The LoRa communications experiment proof-of-concept has been performed using several ground IoT nodes and a miniaturized drone-based payload. The communications have been performed using two MAC protocols which are compatible with an IoT scenario: pure ALOHA and CSMA/CA with RTS/CTS. In both protocols, the useful information to be sent is the data contained in the Data Packet. In this packet, the data obtained by the capacitive soil moisture sensor and the temperature sensor are stored.

In order to perform LoRa communications experiment proof-of-concept, two measurement campaigns have been realized. In the first measurement campaign, the correct functioning of the LoRa modules and sensors has been tested. In the second measurement campaign, several experiments have been performed in which pure ALOHA and CSMA/CA protocols have been tested. In order to test different experiments with different configurations of the protocols, a general code structure has been designed where both the ground nodes and the drone payload are controlled by a command sent by the user. Therefore, the choice of the protocol to be used as well as the configurable parameters of each protocol are sent through a remote command.

Finally, the results obtained in both protocols are analyzed and it is concluded which of the two has better performance against an IoT communications scenario.

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