Nowadays, the monitoring of plant water stress is of high importance in smart agriculture. Instead of the traditional ground soil-moisture measurement, leaf sensing is a new technology, which is used for the detection of plants needing water. In this work, a novel, low-cost and low-power system for leaf sensing using a new plant backscatter sensor node/tag is presented. The latter, can result in the prevention of water waste (water-use efficiency), when is connected to an irrigation system. Specifically, the sensor measures the temperature differential between the leaf and the air, which is directly related to the plant water stress. Next, the tag collects the information from the leaf sensor through an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and then, communicates remotely with a low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) reader using monostatic backscatter architecture. The tag consists of the sensor board, a microcontroller, an external timer and an RF front-end for communication. The timer produces a subcarrier frequency for simultaneous access of multiple tags. The proposed work could be scaled and be a part of a large backscatter wireless sensor network (WSN). The communication protocol exploits the low-complexity Morse code modulation on a 868 MHz carrier signal. The presented novel proof-of-consent prototype is batteryless and was powered by a flexible solar panel consuming power around 20 µW. The performance was validated in an indoors environment where wireless communication was successfully achieved up to 2 m distance.
Future devices for the Internet of Things will require communication systems that can deliver higher data rates at low power. Backscatter radio—in which wireless communication is achieved via reflection rather than radiation—is a low-complexity approach that requires a minimal number of active elements. However, it is typically limited to data rates of hundreds of megabits per second because of the low frequency bands used and the modulation techniques involved. Here we report a millimetre-wave modulator and antenna array for backscatter communications at gigabit data rates. This radiofrequency front-end consists of a microstrip patch antenna array and a single pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor that supports a range of modulation formats including binary phase shift keying, quadrature phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. The circuit is additively manufactured with inkjet printing using silver nanoparticle inks on a flexible liquid-crystal polymer substrate. A millimetre-wave transceiver is also designed to capture and downconvert the backscattered signals and route them for digital signal processing. With the system, we demonstrate a bit rate of two gigabits per second of backscatter transmission at millimetre-wave frequencies of 24–28 GHz, and with a front-end energy consumption of 0.17 pJ per bit.
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