Investigation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a promising data mining solution of precision agriculture.Instrumented with wireless sensors, it will become available to monitor the plants in real time, suchas air temperature, soil water content, and nutrition stress. The real time information of the fields willprovide a solid base for farmers to adjust strategies at any time. WSN will revolutionize the datacollection in agricultural research. However, there have been few researches on the applications ofWSN for agriculture. This work was focused on the investigation of wireless sensor networks inagricultural applications. With a 2.4GHz wireless sensor node, the factors such as the coverage areaand the agricultural environment effects (bare soil, soybean, and corn fields) on the radio werestudied. The datasets were obtained from experiments. They could give an estimation of the sensorsto be deployed in different environments given a certain area.