A Strategic Routing Analysis for Agro Sensor Communications in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Recently, agro sensor communications are getting popularity with the advent of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Infrastructure less MANETs are considered as a potential solution for agricultural domains to provide robust and effective operations in wireless networks by enabling routing characteristics at each mobile node. The efficient use of routing protocol is pivotal for network management in MANETs. In this research, we demonstrate a strategic routing analysis to evaluate the performance of different routing protocols, e.g., proactive and reactive in terms of various network quality of service (QoS) parameters for multiple data rate enabled agro sensor mobile nodes. Two different network scenarios (low-node and high-node) are simulated for various network parameters. Simulation results indicate that OLSR protocol provides higher throughput than others for all nodes. This investigation also shows that GRP has the highest network load capacity than other protocols for agro sensor applications. Another finding from this research i s t hat proactive protocols have the lower average end to end delay and MAC delay than reactive protocols.

I. Introduction

Agriculture is one of basic priorities in any country to ensure food security for peoples’ lives. The proper maintenance of the agricultural field i s required to increase the productivity. However, in developing or under-developed countries, agriculture mainly relies on some natural and environmental functionalities such as seeding, harvesting, irrigation, flood, drought, etc. Random climate changing, limited cultivation capacity, and other stress factors affects agricultural production heavily. In these respects, flood risk management and prediction, real-time control and treatment of crops provided by technology, i.e., wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be a solution for better production by using improved agro-climatological estimation and smart sensors monitoring [1]. Although there are a range of different applications of WSNs such as situation realization, sensing intruders, identification of rival’s movement on land and marine area, unmanned aerial networks, and surveillance of battlefields; this network is also intended for monitoring an agricultural environment for transmitting and receiving information from a particular domain, process them and throw it to the sink. The collaboration of different nodes is a requirement to ensure the communication between sender and receiver through intermediate nodes. Due to the limitation of installing regular infrastructure-based network models in agriculture fields, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are considered as an appropiate style of WSNs to sense, gather, distribute, synthesize, and monitor environmental risks [2]. The increasing demands of various applications (crop surveillance video, crop production, weed, insect, nutrient management, field guide, pest management, diseases, etc) in agricultural domains motivate us to evaluate the impact of multiple data rates (CBR, VBR, and FTP) enabled nodes on transferring information through a MANET. Interested readers are encouraged to go through [3] for the network analysis of multiple data rate applications in case of wireless mobile communication.