An Improvement of ZigBee Tree Routing in the Application of Intelligent Irrigation

As a traditional agricultural country, shortage of water resource has been a critical issue for China. Intelligent irrigation is a promising solution to improve the irrigation efficiency. ZigBee is an emerging wireless communication technology based on IEEE 802.15.4, which has been widely applied in commercial, industrial, medical and agricultural areas. There are many merits to use ZigBee for agricultural irrigation. This paper focuses on optimizing the performance of tree routing mechanism to make it not only easy to realize but also effective. Based on studying the features of ZigBee tree routing and the real situation of the environmental data collection, a modified tree routing mechanism was proposed with the introduction of neighbor table. And a more effective method to find the minimum hops to the destination was given. Finally simulations were done in a platform of NS2. Compared with traditional ZigBee tree routing, our modified tree routing has a better performance with less power consumption per packet transfer and a longer life cycle.