Maintenance — Free solar energy drip irrigation using battery-less RF powered wireless sensors over AD-HOC network

Abstract

The following context emphasizes on the importance of energy and resource efficient irrigation and suggests an architecture for a semi-autonomous electronic drip irrigation system utilizing wireless RF power supply for both sensors and water drip nodes which are not only self sustained by RF signals they transmit and receive; But, also allows extensibility of range of sensors operating in a structure-less AD-HOC network. Unlike older versions of drip irrigation systems which operate using wired or wireless sensors where sensors are limited and installation of new sensors requires additional programming, the new architecture supports the addition of new sensors without any modifications to the firmware as every sensor added to the AD-HOC network formed by the master controller acts as a node with a unique address and hence, the addition of a new node is managed by the firmware which supports `N' number of sensors either communicating directly or indirectly via a chain link of sensors to the master controller. Moreover, the controller, water drip node solenoid valves and sensor nodes being designed with low power devices that it can also be run completely from inexpensive solar cells making the entire irrigation system self-sustained using green energy avoiding human intervention completely.