A self-sustaining unmanned aerial vehicle routing protocol for smart farming

Abstract

Increasing agricultural productivity has been a long quest for farmers and only a few can achieve it. One major factor that hinders them to achieve such goal is the lack of proper agricultural monitoring technique. Recent advancement in technology has enabled the integration of sensor networks and traditional farming, resulting in effective monitoring through smart farming. However, there exists a hefty investment in equipment and infrastructure installation throughout the coverage area. We design two routing approaches, called Location-agnostic (LA) and Location-specific (LS) protocols, to facilitate the self-sustaining agricultural monitoring platform, requiring no infrastructure installation, comprises of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with solar energy harvesting and wireless power transfer capability. The LA protocol does not require location information of monitoring stations to be visited prior to the flight, and is useful for dynamic environment. The LS protocol relies on the complete view of the topology prior to the flight and is suitable for static environment. These protocols determine the optimal UAV routing path from a set of monitoring stations under various conditions. Through a combination of simulation and experimentation studies, we demonstrate significant energy efficiency and coverage area improvement over the classical routing protocol.