A General Agricultural Information Management Architecture for Distributed Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In large-scale agricultural environment management applications, multiple wireless sensor network (WSN) systems are deployed in distributed regions. A general agricultural information management architecture is developed to integrate distributed and heterogeneous WSN systems with different types of environmental factors, sensors and control devices. This architecture includes four layers: sensor layer, gateway layer, central server layer and domain application layer. The first two layers are emphasized with standard interfaces and configurable parameters. We have developed an information management platform which runs on the central server layer, to aggregate multiple WSN information and provide WSN access interface to different applications in the agricultural domain. Inter-layer interactive protocols are also defined. For uniform expression of environment factors and devices, information exchange formats and methods are presented in the protocols. Interaction operations, such as environment information aggregation, sensor configuration upload and control instruction download, are provided with alterable parameters. In the past year, we have applied this architecture to a melon greenhouse production base and an apple tree cultivation base. The melon production information system and the apple expert system both can interact with the information management platform without having detailed knowledge of the WSN.