IoT Architecture for Enhancing Rural Societal Services in Sub-Saharan Africa

The potential of IoT in contributing towards sustainable economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through digital transformation and effective service delivery is widely accepted. However, the unreliability/unavailability of connectivity and power grid infrastructure as well as the unaffordability of the overall system hinders the implementation of a multi-layered IoT architecture for rural societal services in SSA. In this work, affordable IoT architecture that operates without reliance on broadband connectivity and power grid is developed. The architecture employs energy harvesting system and performs data processing, actuation decisions and network management locally by integrating a customized low-cost computationally capable device with the gateway. The sharing of this device among the water resource and quality management, healthcare and agriculture applications further reduces the overall system cost. The evaluation of LPWAN technologies reveals that LoRaWAN has lower cost with added benefits of adaptive data rate and largest community support while providing comparable performance and communication range with the other technologies. The relevant results of the analysis is communicated to end-users’ mobile device via 2G/3G GPRS. Hence, the proposed IoT architecture enables the implementation of IoT systems for improving efficiency in three key application areas at low cost.