Contents I. Introduction
This paper proposes the development of an IDSS in order to schedule the irrigation during the various stages of crop growth. As part of this IDSS there is a simulation procedure, which is based on Matlab® and Opnet® platforms. This IDSS has been tested on maize crop for its growth period, with climatic data provided by the Meteorological Station of Larissa, Greece. The simulation concerns an integrated system that utilizes a proposed WSN to gather soil data, a mathematical model to perform the calculations, and a feedback mechanism to update the input information. The IDSS takes into account the least maintainable amount of water to sustain crop growth. Finally, a new approach is proposed in order to handle the spatial distribution of water evaporation, as it is reflected to local changes in the soil humidity. This system is applied to furrow and center pivot irrigation systems. Precision Farming is among the new exciting agricultural technologies developed in the recent decades. As the technological advancements started to be applied to agriculture for improving the field crop yields, the main factors affecting the crop yield became apparent. These factors are the weather (where the farmer has no control), the soil (with little or no control), the husbandry (with full control) and the plant (with full control by the farmer) [1]. Several precision methods for improving the crop yield have been proposed in the past years. These methods are focusing on monitoring the various parameters affecting the plant such as the weather and the soil conditions during the plant growth. Parameters like the soil humidity can be monitored via sensors connected to a WSN. The employment of WSN for such measures provides high performance, low implementation cost, and the capability of collecting distributed data reliably [2].
