Agricultural monitoring system based on ant colony algorithm with centre data aggregation

This paper proposed environmental parameters are collected by use of outdoor ZigBee based weather stations as a prerequisite for the optimisation of plant growth. In most cases, all the sensors required are integrated into a weather station, due to which merely a single monitoring node is employed following data aggregation. An energy efficient center data aggregation algorithm, where an ant colony algorithm is applied to the construction of a level gradient field, is presented as an effective way to extend the life cycles of sensor nodes. A weather station and a ZigBee module both are portable and easy to install battery operated devices. Furthermore, a remote web-based human machine interface (HMI) is developed by InduSof on a server, and has an access to a database. This proposed algorithm is confirmed by computer simulations as an effective approach to remarkably extend the life cycles of sensor nodes. This work can be applied not merely to traditional outdoor large scale farming, but also to small scale indoor plantation, e.g. in a green house, a plant factory, etc., and applied to the field of conservation ecology.