Design of Smart Irrigation System for Vegetable Farms Based on Efficient Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Designing an efficient irrigation system is a crucial issue in agriculture, due to water scarcity problem around the world with the need of increasing agricultural production to satisfy the demands of the enlargement of population. Therefore, to design a smart irrigation system, a real monitoring of field’s information that affects the watering status is required which can be achieved with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In this paper, an irrigation system based WSN is proposed to save water, power, labor, and as a result, saving cost with production and profit increase. Sensor nodes collect field data to be sent to the Raspberry pi, as a main controller, to make optimal decisions about irrigation process. The field data includes the sensor readings of temperature and soil moisture. Crop evapotranspiration is also considered; thus, the required amount of water is estimated with a particular irrigation time to avoid over irrigation that hurts the plants growth and yields quality. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed system operation and controlling on the irrigation process. These results are taken for tomato plant as a case study. The monitoring tools are used to verify the suggested algorithm effectiveness in irrigation scheduling. Index Terms— Evapotranspiration, Irrigation systems, Raspberry pi, WSN.