Agricultural Monitoring Based on Wireless Sensor Network Technology: Real Long Life Deployments for Physiology and Pathogens Control

Today Wireless Sensor Network are used into an increasing number of commercial solutions, aimed at implementing distributed monitoring and control system in a great number of different application area. In particular the agricultural scenario seems to be one of the most promising application area for WSN due to the necessity of proving the agricultural production chain in terms of precision and quality. This involves a careful system design, since requirements are very strict: battery life-time maximization, robustness, recovery strategies, network flexibility and reconfigurability. This paper shows and describes a practical case study, starting from a real problem and reaching the best architectural solution, with particular focus on the hardware implementation and communication protocol design. A real end-to-end solution has been implemented: several wireless nodes send environmental data every 15 minutes to a master node connected to a GPRS gateway board that forwards data to a remote server using TCP-IP standard protocol. The encouraging and unprecedented results achieved by this approach are supported by several pilot sites into different vineyard in Italy and in France, within which a great amount of environmental data have been collected and analyzed since two years and half.

1. Introduction

In the current technological scenario, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), no longer representing an exclusive academic research field, are capturing increasing companies attention to develop commercial applications thanks to their intrinsic features such as scalability and reliability joined to low cost deployments.