Design of an Integrated Remote and Ground Sensing Monitor System for Assessing Farmland Quality

Abstract

Quality monitoring is important for farmland protection. Here, high-resolution remote sensing data obtained by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and long-term ground sensing data, obtained by wireless sensor networks (WSNs), are uniquely suited for assessing spatial and temporal changes in farmland quality. However, existing UAV-WSN systems are unable to fully integrate the data obtained from these two monitoring systems. This work addresses this problem by designing an improved UAV-WSN monitoring system that can collect both high-resolution UAV images and long-term WSN data during a single-flight mission. This is facilitated by a newly proposed data transmission optimization routing protocol (DTORP) that selects the communication node within a cluster of the WSN to maximize the quantity of data that can be efficiently transmitted, additionally combining individual scheduling algorithms and routing algorithms appropriate for three different distance scales to reduce the energy consumption incurred during data transmission between the nodes in a cluster. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated based on Monte Carlo simulations by comparisons with that obtained by a conventional system using the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. The results demonstrate that the proposed system provides a greater total volume of transmitted data, greater energy utilization efficiency, and a larger maximum revisit period than the conventional system. This implies that the proposed UAV-WSN monitoring system offers better overall performance and enhanced potential for conducting long-term farmland quality data collection over large areas in comparison to existing systems.

Tessellation-Based Construction of Air Route for Wireless Sensor Networks Employing UAV

“…There have been several studies on the establishment of points of interest and the construction of air routes in a wireless sensor network in which a UAV plays the role of a sink node [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]. In [ 7 ], heavily loaded sensor nodes were designated as special sensor nodes that a mobile sink would visit.…”

“…In [ 12 ], geographical points at which a mobile sink collects data were built, and a path that passes these points was designed so that the cost incurred by the mobile sink’s flying between any two points as well as the cost brought by the sensor node’s forwarding data to a point. In [ 16 ], sensor nodes were clustered in a wireless sensor network. Then, the head of each cluster that a UAV visits was selected so as to maximize the amount of efficiently transmitted data.…”