IRIGNET: intelligent communication network for power-scarce rural India

Abstract

Considering the contribution agriculture has made towards India's rapid raise in economic status, its relevance to the nation's subjects, its depth and far reaching wing span across the length and breadth of the country and foremost to account for the turmoil through which the farming community in India is going through under the current circumstances, it does deserve to be treated with higher reverence and priority. Although agriculture has made enormous contribution towards India's rapid raise in economic status, accounting for nearly 20% of the GDP and the livelihood for 58% of the population, the farmers who are the mainstay of this industry face a lot of problems in raising crops and sustaining production. This paper proposes a system that will automate the irrigation system, especially in rural India, to compensate for the flimsy, inconsistent and unreliable power supply system. Suggested design uses a Central regional scheduler server hosting an intelligent software working alongside with remote microcontroller based sensors to get up to date environmental parameters so as to assist it to work out the best array of water pumps to be turned on at a given instance. Sensor devices are kept at the vicinity of where the water pumps are so that influential decision making parameters can be sensed and fed to the intelligent software stationed at the central server. It uses mobile technology to handshake between the central server and the sensor controllers. Various derivatives of the same are discussed which need to be weighed in terms of their practicality, ease of deployment and of course the cost factor. It also helps the nation to preserve both water and electricity by enforcing controlled but adequate usage of the same.