An Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Internet of Things Based Precision Agriculture

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are widely used in Precision Agriculture (PA) to increase the productivity and for monitoring the crop. Agricultural field is spanned over many acres and in order to design an efficient monitoring network, one of the key requirements is to maintain the sensor coverage and network connectivity. WSNs are often operated in resource constrained environments and is required to design power aware algorithm for routing, data acquisition, communication in order to enhance the network lifetime. This research work focus to design an Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (EERP) designated to PA applications. In this protocol, energy efficiency is achieved by distributed data collection and reduced number of transmissions in various phases of route setup. Maximum agricultural land coverage, monitoring the sensor node energy, and routing protocol scalability are the few elements that influence the WSN implementation in precision agriculture. The Sensor Nodes (SN) have limited storage so the nodes should store only the important data. This research work has also proposed designing and developing an EERP that offers effective coverage and a better network lifetime. The proposed protocol outperforms the existing AODV and DSR protocol in terms of the packet drop rate, energy consumption, end to end delay, network lifetime and throughput.