PotatoSense: A wireless sensor network system for precision agriculture

Recently, numerous innovative applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged in various domains ranging from military surveillance to environment monitoring. The food crisis that has recently affected the whole planet is characterized by the growing demand of food resources, rise of energy prices, and climate changes. In order to face this challenge, a modern approach consists of exploiting technologies and techniques for achieving more production and economies of scale. This has given rise to a new application domain that has been termed as `precision agriculture´. The development of WSN applications in the agricultural sector is attracting considerable research efforts, because these technologies are very suitable for distributed data collection and monitoring in tough environments such as greenhouses and cropland. In this paper, the implementation of a precision agriculture application, PotatoSense, for monitoring a potato plantation field in Mauritius is described. Energy-efficiency being one of the most important challenges in battery operated WSNs systems, different energy efficient algorithms are used in the proposed system to ensure that the system lifespan is prolonged. Additionally, a monitoring application has been developed to process the data obtained from the simulated WSN. The monitoring application is able to indicate regions of the potato field that need irrigation, pesticides or fertilizers. Furthermore, the administrator may also view historical data of specific region in the potato field.