A Review of Wireless Sensor Technologies (Communication) and Applications in Agriculture: Trends with Focus on Zigbee Technology
ABSTRACT
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is to monitor the environment via devices called sensor nodes or motes for parameters such as temperature, light, humidity, moisture and improve agricultural techniques like water management. It helps to improve crop productivity, reduce production cost and make use of real time values for decision not prediction. The paper is to review precision agriculture and standards for wireless communications (IEEE for LAN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS) and using ZigBee in the Agri-Food sector.
INTRODUCTION
A system to monitor various parameters like Temperature, Humidity, Soil moisture, water level sensor with remote (wireless) control of Motor. We are using a wireless sensor network based on Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 standard as a station network to send weather information. This research focuses on developing devices and tools to manage, display and alert the weather/disaster warnings using the advantages of a wireless sensor network system. Zigbee is new wireless technology guided by IEEE 802.15.4 Personal Area Network standard [1]. It is primarily designed for the wide range controlling applications and to replace the existing non-standard technologies.
The agricultural practices such as irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizers, pesticides are traditional. The concern of better quality agricultural products from the consumers made the farmers adapt to latest agricultural techniques by implementing modern technologies for producing better agricultural products. Traditional farming involves human labor. With good monitoring and data on the crops and market, the farmer will deliver the quality products to the consumer.
In this paper we have discussed about online monitoring of agriculture parameter using multiple sensors like temperature, humidity and water level sensor. Real-time update of data from the sensor node data is transferred to the Zigbee to another end server PC [2]. Values from field are send to farmer to know condition of field. Ability to record changing environmental parameters over time is important and research on remote weather stations.
Conclusion
Zigbee-based agriculture monitoring system serves as a reliable and efficient system to monitor the environmental parameters. Wirelessly reduces labor and accurate values. Its economical, consumes less power and can control 254 devices, which in turn leads to the development of Home Automation, Health Care Automation, Traffic etc.
This research focuses on developing devices and tools to manage, display and alert the weather/disaster warnings using the advantages of a wireless sensor network system. WSN is emerging technology and it have wide range of applications. WSN plays an important role in development of precision agriculture. Using WSN we can utilize water to increases crop yield for maximum profit.
In farming Temperature, Humidity and CO2 are the most essential parameters. The growth of crops is mainly depending on these three parameters. Currently farmers don’t have any system which will show real time levels of these parameters [8]. The proposed system is going to monitor these changes periodically and take an action automatically. Visualization of the graphical representation of all the data from the green house and later on farmer can operate the devices from remote location by using its smart phone.
