Deployment Strategies of Soil Monitoring WSN for Precision Agriculture Irrigation Scheduling in Rural Areas

Abstract

Deploying wireless sensor networks (WSN) in rural environments such as agricultural fields may present some challenges that affect the communication between the nodes due to the vegetation. These challenges must be addressed when implementing precision agriculture (PA) systems that monitor the fields and estimate irrigation requirements with the gathered data. In this paper, different WSN deployment configurations for a soil monitoring PA system are studied to identify the effects of the rural environment on the signal and to identify the key aspects to consider when designing a PA wireless network. The PA system is described, providing the architecture, the node design, and the algorithm that determines the irrigation requirements. The testbed includes different types of vegetation and on-ground, near-ground, and above-ground ESP32 Wi-Fi node placements. The results of the testbed show high variability in densely vegetated areas. These results are analyzed to determine the theoretical maximum coverage for acceptable signal quality for each of the studied configurations. The best coverage was obtained for the near-ground deployment. Lastly, the aspects of the rural environment and the deployment that affect the signal such as node height, crop type, foliage density, or the form of irrigation are discussed.

Six-Gear Roadmap towards the Smart Factory

“…Network infrastructure scaling can be achieved by enhancing the factory floor communication, network capability and performance by using emerging wireless communication technologies such as 5G for rapid and reliable communication, Wi-Fi, LTE, ZigBee, LoRa and LoRaWAN for cost effective and rapid deployment. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) systems that deploy wireless communication technologies and IoT connectivity architecture have been widely applied in various applications such as in smart cities [96], in agriculture and environment monitoring [97][98][99], in transportation [100] and in food manufacturing [101]. These applications can be transferred and widely adapted in manufacturing to enable further data-driven smart manufacturing applications.…”

Dimensioning of Wide-Area Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) System for IoT-Based Automation

“…IoT connected to WSN has been implemented on a limited scale in agriculture as reported in [21][22][23][24]. Most WSN-and IoT-based irrigation automation systems utilize soil moisture content and other environmental variables to schedule irrigation without considering plant growth; however, this is insufficient for automating the AWD method and gaining the farmers' trust.…”

Architecture and communication protocol to monitor and control water quality and irrigation in agricultural environments

“…Furthermore, its extensive documentation allows farmers and non-technicians to easily operate the devices. Wi-Fi has been thoroughly studied for agricultural applications considering different types of vegetation and different positions of emitter and receiver and, it is the most utilized wireless technology in PA IoT systems [45]. ZigBee would also be a good solution but its usage in PA is yet to grow.…”

“…The Things Network was able to perform a Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) transmission that reached 766 km utilizing a transmission power of 25mW on two occasions [46]. Although the maximum theoretical distance would not exceed 6 km for the configurations required to achieve higher data rates in the 868 MHz frequency band [45]. Furthermore, the LoRaWAN protocol only considers a star topology, which presents a limit to the distance between node and gateway.…”

“…Regarding the sensors used for monitoring the soil temperature, which are mentioned in [86,89,45,94,113,117,144,173,174], the different sensors are detailed in this paragraph. There are five papers that do not specify the sensors used [94,113,117,144,174].…”