LoRaWAN: Long Range Wide Area Network. A low-power, wide-area networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated 'things' to the internet in regional, national or global networks.
VarshaKrishi utilizes the 433MHz LoRa band to ensure that remote farms in India, often lacking 4G or Wi-Fi penetration, can establish a highly resilient sensor mesh network spanning up to 5km radially.
LoRa (Long Range) is the physical radio layer: it uses chirp spread spectrum modulation in sub-GHz bands (433/865-867 MHz in India) to trade data rate for range and penetration. LoRaWAN is the network protocol on top, it defines how battery-powered end nodes talk to gateways, how transmissions are scheduled to conserve power, and how data is encrypted end-to-end. A single message might carry just 20-50 bytes, a soil moisture reading, a temperature, a battery voltage, which is why nodes can run for months on a small solar panel and battery.
India's farms are precisely the environment LoRa was designed for: large open areas, no wired infrastructure, unreliable cellular coverage, and sensors that need to run unattended for a full season. A LoRa link reaches 5 km or more in open farmland, far beyond Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and requires no SIM card, no subscription and no mobile tower. India's licence-free 865-867 MHz band means deployment needs no spectrum permission.
Where a project needs ground-truth readings, VarshaKrishi deploys procured, field-configured LoRaWAN-capable instrumentation reporting to a local gateway, paired with satellite monitoring that needs no field connectivity at all. Advisories are computed against literature-cited agronomy models such as FAO-56 and TOMCAST DSV.
LoRa is the radio modulation technique (the physical layer); LoRaWAN is the network protocol built on top of it that manages device authentication, scheduling and encryption. A system can use LoRa radios with a custom protocol instead of full LoRaWAN, VarshaKrishi does this to optimise for offline village-gateway topologies.
India permits licence-free LoRa operation in the 865-867 MHz band (and 433 MHz ISM). No spectrum licence or SIM card is required, which keeps recurring connectivity costs at zero.
In open farmland a single LoRaWAN gateway typically covers 2–5 km, and 10 km or more with line-of-sight and an elevated antenna. Terrain, crop canopy and antenna height are the main factors that shrink real-world range.
LoRaWAN trades bandwidth for range and battery life. It carries small sensor readings over kilometres using milliwatts of power, so field nodes can run for months on batteries or small solar panels, no mains power or cellular coverage required.
See also: Edge AI, Capacitive Soil Sensor, or browse the full smart farming glossary.
Discover how VarshaKrishi utilizes this technology in our offline-first systems across rural India.
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