Self Configuring Wireless Sensor Network for Precision Irrigation

Abstract

Precision Irrigation is a farm management strategy used to increase the water efficiency of a farm in which the right amount of water is fed to the soil at right time by sensing the real time soil conditions in the field. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Technology is widely used in farms to measure soil conditions at various locations of the farm and use the data for making decisions in the areas to be irrigated with the right amount of water. This project presents the design and development of a self organizing and fault tolerant ad-hoc multi-hop WSN for precision irrigation using low cost commercially available electronic components. This includes the design and development of hardware units for Sensor Nodes to be deployed in the field for the measurement of soil humidity and a centralized Base Station to collect the information from the nodes and make decisions on irrigating. A reliable multi-hop WSN system with ad-hoc routing algorithm for prolonged lifetime and fault tolerance has been developed and demonstrated using field trials and lab level simulations. The project also developed a user interface to monitor and archive the data acquired through the network.