Performance Assessment of Radio Frequency Based Centralized Wireless Sensor Network to an Agriculture Field

Abstract

The newly emerged wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has spread rapidly into agriculture and farming industry, seeking this cost effective technology to improve its production and enhance agriculture yield standard through environmental monitoring. This agricultural environment monitoring system could monitor the environmental information on the outdoors remotely and it could be expected that, it will contribute for increasing crop yields and improving quality of the agriculture field by supporting the decision making of crop producers through analysis of the collected information. This system consists of set of sensor nodes and one centralized controller. Sensor nodes gather environmental conditions temperature, relative humidity and soil moisture of the field and transmit those data to a centralized controller. Centralized controller gathers all the data coming from each and every sensor node then sends those data to the server. Received data are stored in the database in the PC and allow it to be analyzed and displayed as needed. Each and every node and centralized controller are powered by solar panels and battery backup which are established near each and every unit. According to the results, it gives more accurate temperature and humidity measurement of the field. This is a very low cost system with low power consumption and therefore can be an ideal system for a developing country like Sri Lanka.