Experimental Evaluation of Propagation Models for Precision Agriculture Wireless Links

This work analyzes signal propagation in Long Range (LoRa) wireless links for precision agriculture by comparing classical propagation models and models that account for vegetation attenuation against experimental measurements in three scenarios: short grass, maize crop, and palm plantation. Classical models include Log-distance, Close-In (CI), and Okumura-Hata, while vegetation attenuation models include ITU-R P.833, COST-235, FITU-R, LITU-R, and Chen-Kuo.This comparison provides experimental evidence on how model performance changes with the vegetation characteristics of each agricultural scenario. Results show that CI performs best in short grass and maize, with errors near MAE 3.81 dB and 3.14 dB, respectively. Palm plantation, the most complex scenario, shows the best agreement with COST-235, with errors around MAE 9.50 dB.