Rural Internet of Things (IoT) systems connect sensors and actuators in remote areas, serving crucial roles in agriculture and environmental monitoring. Given the absence of networking infrastructure for backhaul in these regions, satellite IoT techniques offer a cost-effective solution for connectivity. However, current satellite IoT architectures often struggle to deliver high performance due to temporal and spatial link challenges. This paper presents SateRIoT, a new network architecture with temporal link estimation and spatial link sharing that fully exploits the capability of space low-cost low-earth-orbit (LEO) IoT satellites and ground low-power wide area (LPWA) IoT techniques in rural areas. First, we introduce a bursty link model that predicts the number of transmittable packets within a transmission window, reducing energy waste from failed uplink transmissions. Moreover, we enhance the model by selecting informative features and optimizing the window length. Additionally, we develop a multi-hop flooding protocol that enables gateways to buffer and share data packets across the network while incorporating a priority data queue to avoid duplicate transmissions. We implement SateRIoT with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) IoT satellite and LoRa radios, then evaluate its performance based on real deployment and real-world collected traces. The results show that SateRIoT can consume 3.3X less energy consumption for an individual gateway. Moreover, SateRIoT offers up to a 5.6X reduction in latency for a single packet and a 1.9X enhancement in throughput.

SateRIoT: High-performance Ground-Space Networking for Rural IoT