A wireless sensor network for precision agriculture and its performance

Abstract

The use of wireless sensor networks is essential for implementation of information and control technologies in precision agriculture. We present our design of network stack for such an application where sensor nodes periodically collect data from fixed locations in a field. Our design of the physical layer consists of multiple power modes in both the receive and transmit operations for the purpose of achieving energy savings. In addition, we design our MAC layer to use these multiple power modes to improve the energy efficiency of wake‐up synchronization phase. Our MAC protocol also organizes all the sender nodes to be synchronized with the receiver simultaneously and transmit their data in a time scheduled manner. Next, we design our energy aware routing strategy that balances the energy consumption over the nodes in the entire field and minimizes the number of wake‐up synchronization overheads by scheduling the nodes for transmission in accordance with the structure of the routing tree. We develop analytical models and simulation studies to compare the energy consumption of our MAC protocol with that of the popular S‐MAC protocol for a typical network topology used in our application under our routing strategy. Our MAC protocol is shown to have better energy efficiency as well as latency in a periodic data collection application. We also show the improvements resulting from the use of our routing strategy, in simulations, compared with the case when the next hop is chosen randomly from the set of neighbors that are closer to the sink node. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Custom-designed wireless mote performance analysis in diverse node placement and antenna positioning scenarios for agricultural monitoring

“…Underground experiments were conducted at deeper depth conditions as discussed in Section 5. Sahota et al (2011) have modelled the design of a sensor network for automated collection of soil data. Though the work claims to have implemented an energy efficient network, sufficient results have not been provided on the spatial placement and antenna positioning.…”

Efficient Complete Coverage Through Heterogeneous Sensing Nodes

“…Thus, for an equilateral triangle network with a given b, an equivalent grid network with a is obtained by equating (6) and (7) …”

“…However, in many real life applications in which sensing nodes are expensive and sophisticated devices, controlled (or deterministic) deployment is generally adapted and approved. For instance, in agricultural domain, to monitor climatic conditions such as temperature and humidity etc., a sensor network is deployed in which wireless sensors are spread throughout a field in the form of a grid (or other regular patterns) to completely cover a field [6]. Similarly, there are other numerous monitoring and surveillance applications in which deterministic deployment approaches are adapted for complete coverage (e.g., [1] and [4]).…”

Wireless Sensor Networks and Monitoring of Environmental Parameters in Precision Agriculture

“…In simulator based simulators like TOSSIM, Matlab and QualNet were used to carry out implementation experiments where as in implementation based system were designed, deployed and implemented [12]. The studies [13,14,15] show the WSN is a promising technology to be included in farms to help a farmer.…”

“…But with the research advancements hybrid WSN"s (WSN along with Wireless Underground Sensor Network, WUSN) [9] are also now being used to get the underground information [19]. Several modifications and advancements were made in both the protocol stack, routing algorithms, software and hardware of WSN to suit the agricultural needs [10,11,12].…”