Design and implementation of wireless sensor and actor network for precision agriculture

Precision agriculture (PA) is a research discipline based on the investigation of the differences that exist in every cultivated field. And wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) are new technology that can provide viable solutions for PA applications, which can not only aquire the relative data, but also automatically take reactive respones to the change of environment. In this paper a specific WSAN application for PA with the ability of intelligent irrigation is developed, and the functions of the platform can be extended to other applications of PA. Besides, video nodes can be integrated to provide visual data. A system architecture is proposed to fulfill the PA requirements. Then detailed implementation strategies of hardware and software are discussed, including sensor nodes, solar-powered actor nodes, video nodes, gateway and control center software. System performance experiments validate the rationality of the design and implementation, then future improvements are proposed.