Wireless Sensor Networks-based Smart Agriculture: Sensing Technologies, Application and Future Directions

Abstract

With the advent of the latest sensing technologies, agricultural tasks can be performed so quickly and
adequately and termed Smart agriculture. In this paper, a system based on sensor networks has been designed to
monitor agricultural parameters wirelessly. The proposed system has been deployed in a Wheat field. The aim of this work
is to increase the quality and productivity of the Wheat crops and minimize the extensive field visits of the farmers. This
system enables precision agriculture by periodically measuring the three most key parameters (temperature, light, and
water level) for achieving a remarkable increase in quality, productivity and growth of the Wheat crops. Thus, this system
helps the agriculturists, landowners and research experts to monitor these parameters at the base station without going
to the field site. A GUI tool is also designed to display the measured data and stored it in the database accordingly. While
designing this system; IRIS mote, MDA100 data acquisition board, and MIB520 USB interface board are employed. We
use TinyOS operating system for the development of codes for wireless nodes and the GUI tool is designed in Microsoft
Visual Studio. ZigBee IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and direct topology are used for the communication of nodes with the base
station.