Deployment of a Low-Power LoRa Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring in Antarctica

The Bulgarian Antarctic base St. Kliment Ohridski on Livingston Island is occupied only from November to March. For the remaining eight to nine months it stands unattended and largely powered down — yet its environment keeps being measured. This talk shows how a LoRa sensor network winters there alone: battery data loggers sample four channels every fifteen minutes and buffer a full day of readings, while the gateway and the Starlink backhaul wake for a single fifteen-minute window per day, keeping LoRa under 5% of the site's power budget. We then ask how far such a window can scale — the answer ranges from 78 to 3,000 nodes depending on how you access the channel — and preview W-Mesh, a duty-cycled store-and-forward mesh that will carry glacier stakes and hidden valleys into the same daily window, several hops beyond what LoRaWAN Relay can reach.