Design and validation of a wireless sensor network architecture for precision horticulture applications

This paper proposes a general wireless sensor network architecture for monitoring horticultural crops that are distributed among small plots scattered at distances of up to 10 km from one another. The technology used for the real implementation of the architecture is based on the B-MAC (Berkeley Medium Access Control) medium access protocol to assure a high degree of sensor node power autonomy. To resolve this issue, a series of specialized sensor nodes (Soil-Mote, Environmental-Mote and Water-Mote) have been developed along with a gateway to interconnect them with the farm central offices. Before starting device development, simulations were conducted to ensure that acceptable performance would be achieved with the selected technology in terms of node autonomy, achieved throughput and delays. To that end, it was necessary to implement the selected B-MAC protocol in the ns-2 (Network Simulator-2) simulation framework. The final system was deployed on a real crop to check and validate the simulation results against experimental results.