Agriculture is one of the main economic industries of a country. Application of information technologies in agriculture, smart agriculture, aims to realize precision control of irrigation, fertilizer, diseases, and insect pests prevention in the growing of crops. For the sake of obtaining the interest data, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used to collect the interest data in the farm field and send the obtained data to the servers via wireless communication. Since the WSNs usually operate in the unlicensed spectrum, the available resource elements (REs) are scarce especially when a large number of sensor nodes are deployed in the farm field. To accommodate more sensor nodes and prolong the lifetime of the WSNs in agriculture, relay-aided non-orthogonal multiple access is introduced into the uplink transmission stage of the direct transmission from the sensor nodes to the sink node. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can transmit multiple symbols simultaneously on the same RE by splitting them in the power domain and distinguish them according to diverse power levels of different symbols. The average sum data rate and outage probability of the relay-aided NOMA in uplink transmission are theoretically analyzed. The numerical simulation results show that the WSNs with relay-aided NOMA outperforms the traditional OMA scheme in uplink transmission in WSNs in agriculture.

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In the present work, centrifugal deposited Au-Pd core-shell nanoparticle (NP) film was proposed for the room-temperature optical detection of hydrogen gas. The size dimension of 44, 48, 54, and 62 nm Au-Pd core-shell nanocubes with 40 nm Au core were synthesized following a solution-based seed-mediated growth method. Compared to a pure Pd NP, this core-shell structure with an inert Au core could decrease the H diffusion length in the Pd shell. Through a modified centrifugal deposition process, continues film samples with different core-shell NPs were deposited on 10 mm diameter quartz substrates. Under various hydrogen concentration conditions, the optical response properties of these samples were characterized by an intensity-based optical fiber bundle sensor. Experimental results show that the continues film that was composed of 62 nm Au-Pd core-shell NPs has achieved a stable and repeatable reflectance response with low zero drift in the range of 4 to 0.1% hydrogen after a stress relaxation mechanism at first few loading/unloading cycles. Because of the short H diffusion length due to the thinner Pd shell, the film sample composed of 44 nm Au-Pd NPs has achieved a dramatically decreased response/recovery time to 4 s/30 s. The experiments present the promising prospect of this simple method to fabricate optical hydrogen sensors with controllable high sensitivity and response rate at low cost.

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