Wireless Sensor Network for Orchard Soil and Climate Monitoring

Soil and climate monitoring plays an important role in orchard farming management. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an efficient approach for monitoring large-scale orchard with densely distributed smart nodes. Combined with a project of facility cultivation of local pear variety in Zhejiang province, China, a newly designed structure of WSN combining network clustering and route enhancing is proposed with an aim at facilitating node deployment in orchard and regular network maintenance. The topology of wireless sensing cluster, hard- and soft- design of wireless node and routing enhancement are elaborated. The testing result shows that the proposed scheme has the capability of robust data transmission, high sensing accuracy of soil and climate parameters and excellent data consistency. The design method proposed in the paper is also suitable for other farmland monitoring system.