Abstract
The production of tomatoes in greenhouses, in addition to its relevance in nutrition and health, is an activity of the agroindustry with high economic importance in Spain, the first exporter in Europe of this vegetable. The technological updating with precision agriculture, implemented in order to ensure adequate production, leads to a deployment planning of wireless sensors with limited coverage by the attenuation of radio waves in the presence of vegetation. The well-known propagation models FSPL (Free-Space Path Loss), two-ray, COST235, Weissberger, ITU-R (International Telecommunications Union—Radiocommunication Sector), FITU-R (Fitted ITU-R), offer values with an error percentage higher than 30% in the 2.4 GHz band in relation to those measured in field tests. As a substantial improvement, we have developed optimized propagation models, with an error estimate of less than 9% in the worst-case scenario for the later benefit of farmers, consumers and the economic chain in the production of tomatoes.
Highlights
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) predicts that the world population will reach 8 billion people by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050 [1]
The precision agriculture (PA) relies on applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the function of monitoring and controlling the management of a field because it reduces the costs of monitoring and managing crop production at the plant level, instead of monitoring the entire greenhouse [4,5,6,7,8,9] or with the purpose to make environmental measurements [10]
According to the literature reviewed we have found similar research that studies the influence of foliage on radio path losses for Wireless sensor networks (WSN) planning orchards [18] and a study that improves the path loss model for wireless sensor networks in mango greenhouses [19], others based on deployment of WSN
Summary
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) predicts that the world population will reach 8 billion people by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050 [1]. Precision agriculture arises from the need for technologies to collect information in agricultural areas about soil conditions from the environment and transmit data It offers the means for agricultural practices to be monitored, evaluated and controlled. The surface of greenhouses in the world exceeds 700,000 ha, being concentrated mainly in Asia, in the Mediterranean basin, and in central and northern Europe [15] In this order of ideas, world exports of tomatoes exceeded 6.9 billion euros in 2013, with the EU, the main sector of world trade in fresh tomatoes, with 57.8% in 2013 (volume in kg) and 65.7% of turnover (volume in euros). Its main markets are in the EU, especially Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom [16,17] Due to this relevance, our research is focused on tomato greenhouses
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