RF and battery performance study for WSN in palm oil plantation applications

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for Precision Agriculture application particularly on RF and battery performance of the mote. The WSN consists of energy-efficient and scalable communication protocols and low power hardware platforms. The architecture comprises of four main parts- (a) the sensor tip, (b) the mote, (c) the router and (d) the gateway to address the needs of wireless sensor networks. The sensor node (mote and tip) powered by 2xAA-size batteries and can sleep at a very low current. This paper discussed on the RF performance by doing two type of test; transmit power and receiver sensitivity. A power management test was also carried out to identify maximum current during mote transmitting and minimum current during sleep mode. Details of the test and conclusion are described in this paper.