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Hardware platforms for IoT nodes in agriculture applications: a power-consumption oriented analysis

Abstract:

Nowadays there are several hardware alternatives to implement nodes for an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure. However, the required characteristics to build a custom IoT node can differ. This paper presents a comparative study, focused mainly on power consumption, of several alternatives of microcontroller-based printed circuit boards (PCB), to deploy IoT nodes for agricultural applications. For this aim, a prototype of a sensor node was designed, which measures environmental conditions. Several versions of this node were built, each one based on one of the analyzed PCBs. The power consumption (in normal and low-power modes) and other features were compared in each version. Results show that nodes based on PCBs with ESP32 or ESP8266 microcontrollers have lower consumption, although they have less capacity to connect more sensors. This study can serve as a guide when developing an IoT node not only for the agricultural sector, but in any other kind of remote IoT application.