Opportunities and Challenges with WSN’s in Smart Technologies: A Smart Agriculture Perspective

Study of a smart environment is very common these days. The techniques for building smart applications, consist of manufacturing devices and sensors, which can communicate with each other to monitor their surrounding conditions. These conditions may be environmental conditions like pollutant gases, radiations, noise and waste etc. Basically, useful information is generated by the sensor nodes deployed in the environment and decision implementation is done by the controller to control the conditions according to requirement of the users or applications. Wireless sensor networks are able to accumulate the information from the environment. This may be done with the help of tiny sensors nodes which can communicate with the other sensor nodes wirelessly and are not harmful to the environment. These tiny sensor nodes operate on low power to perform various operations like sensing and any type of calculations. The communication process between the sensor nodes also consumes low power which will ensure the long life of the networks. The architecture of the sensor nodes gives the advantage to program the micro-controllers associated with these, depending upon the applications. There are numerous of applications of wireless sensor networks which include applications in healthcare, defense, smart cities, event detection and underwater monitoring applications. Also in the field of smart agriculture, sensors play a vital role in different applications like soil quality checking, precision agriculture and irrigation control. In this chapter, a study of wireless sensor networks for smart applications is conducted. The main focus of the chapter is on smart applications in agriculture. The chapter answers questions like how to design and develop smart techniques for agriculture, how can the wireless sensor networks help in precision agriculture.