Investigation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Precision Agriculture

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a promising data mining solution of precision agriculture. Instrumented with wireless sensors, it will become available to monitor the plants in real time, such as air temperature, soil water content, and nutrition stress. The real time information of the fields will provide a solid base for farmers to adjust strategies at any time. WSN will revolutionize the data collection in agricultural research. However, there have been few researches on the applications of WSN for agriculture. This work was focused on the investigation of wireless sensor networks in agricultural applications. With a 2.4GHz wireless sensor node, the factors such as the coverage area and the agricultural environment effects (bare soil, soybean, and corn fields) on the radio were studied. The datasets were obtained from experiments. They could give an estimation of the sensors to be deployed in different environments given a certain area.