Practical MANETs for Pervasive Cattle Monitoring

The application of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks to cattle monitoring has the potential to increase the profitability of cattle production and positively impact the everyday live of farm personnel. The main research challenges are identifying and refining realistic requirements for a MANET routing protocol and designing such protocol. In this paper we report on the field experiments we performed in order to address this. Our approach builds on energy efficient MANETs to provide continuous monitoring of multidimensional parameters of animal mobility including temporal and spatial walking intensity and feed intake in order to detect oestrus, pregnancy, animal diseases and reduced efficiency of pastures. We support remote and in-situ, specific and range queries and notifications about newly detected events. Our extensive set of emulations show that we achieve lower and more balanced energy consumption while preserving the delays for increasing number of nodes within the user expected boundaries.