A Reliable Wireless Control System for Tomato Hydroponics

TLDR

ICT‑enabled hydroponic systems can produce high‑quality crops with reduced labor, yet wireless sensor networks suffer packet loss and equipment failure in hot, humid environments; the 400 MHz band offers better obstacle penetration and zero‑data‑loss communication through guaranteed time‑slot scheduling. The study proposes a reliable wireless control system for hydroponic tomato cultivation using the 400 MHz band and IEEE 802.15.6. The system employs the 400 MHz band with guaranteed time‑slot scheduling and incorporates fault tolerance and self‑healing to recover from packet transmission failures. Experiments show the 400 MHz band yields lower packet error rates than 2.4 GHz and enables real‑time, lossless hydroponic liquid supply control.

Abstract

Agricultural systems using advanced information and communication (ICT) technology can produce high-quality crops in a stable environment while decreasing the need for manual labor. The system collects a wide variety of environmental data and provides the precise cultivation control needed to produce high value-added crops; however, there are the problems of packet transmission errors in wireless sensor networks or system failure due to having the equipment in a hot and humid environment. In this paper, we propose a reliable wireless control system for hydroponic tomato cultivation using the 400 MHz wireless band and the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The 400 MHz band, which is lower than the 2.4 GHz band, has good obstacle diffraction, and zero-data-loss communication is realized using the guaranteed time-slot method supported by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In addition, this system has fault tolerance and a self-healing function to recover from faults such as packet transmission failures due to deterioration of the wireless communication quality. In our basic experiments, the 400 MHz band wireless communication was not affected by the plants’ growth, and the packet error rate was less than that of the 2.4 GHz band. In summary, we achieved a real-time hydroponic liquid supply control with no data loss by applying a 400 MHz band WSN to hydroponic tomato cultivation.