Hybrid networking infrastructure for greenhouse management system

In this paper we focus on the problems related to the management of a farm made up of several greenhouses. Management of this kind of farms requires data acquisition in each greenhouse and their transfer to a control unit which is usually located in a control room, separated from the production area. At present, data transfer between the greenhouses and the control system is mainly provided by a suitable wired communication system, such as a Fieldbus. In such contexts, even though the replacement of the wired system with a fully wireless one can appear very attractive, a fully wireless system can introduce some disadvantages. A solution based on a hybrid wired/wireless network, where CAN and ZigBee protocols are used, is presented along with all the related problems that this integration involves. In particular, in order to integrate the wireless section with the wired one at the Data Link Layer, a suitable multi-protocol bridge has been implemented, while, at the application layer, a porting of SDS services on ZigBee, which we called ZSDS, allows us to access the network resources independently from the network segment they are connected to.