Building a low cost solution using wireless sensor network for agriculture application

Abstract

In many countries around the globe improper management of water resources for agriculture is one of the main issues for failure to crop yield. Hence there is a demand of water management system for agriculture which will maximize the crop yield. In this paper a novel approach is made to design and fabricate a closed-loop control system for soil-moisture monitoring and controlling. It is achieved through deployment of proposed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) model in agriculture field. Since the end users are farmers, the cost of the product holds great importance. In market there are many WSN motes available but they are not application specific. The costs of these motes are much higher and beyond the reach of farmers. Due to this reason we have designed new sensor nodes with the help of Arduino Platform and Raspberry Pi module to minimize the cost of entire product. Selection of hardware component, firmware development, integration and field implementation, testing and optimization are the processes that have been followed to develop the product. The benefit of such design is to control all desired parameters for WSN according to own application requirement that sometimes is not achievable from the marketed product.