Enabling Large Scale Ad Hoc Animal Welfare Monitoring

Automated animal monitoring with energy efficient wireless devices mounted on the animals can improve efficiency of farming industry and increase its profitability by decreasing reliance on human labor. We discuss the practical deployment of delay tolerant store and forward cattle monitoring architecture that provides data retention, detecting custom events, notification issuing, remote and in-situ queries answering. The core of this architecture, a novel energy efficient, disruption tolerant, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocol (EERD), provides offloading data for long term storage by sending data to farm servers via sinks that are a part of a MANET and handles in-situ queries issued by users collocated with the animals. The energy efficiency is achieved by dynamic adaptation to the current behavior of the animals carrying the monitoring devices. We discuss the practical feasibility of this architecture by analyzing data from the extensive field experiments we performed. We address the challenges posed by the practical deployment. In particular we propose an energy efficient mechanism for dealing with disconnections and identify potential security threats that include unauthorized fabricating, changing and accessing collected measurements, as well as MANET routing attacks. Finally we propose feasible precautions against these threats and discuss their impact on our energy efficient routing protocol (EERD).