A novel hybrid routing protocol for data aggregation in agricultural applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communication capabilities. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a promising data mining solution for precision agriculture. Instrumented with wireless sensors, it will become available to monitor the plants for real time, such as air temperature, soil water content, and nutrition stress. This real time information will provide a solid base for farmers to adjust the strategies at any time. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs. The focus, however, has been given to routing protocols which might differ depending on the application and network architecture. In this paper, authors present a novel hybrid routing technique for data aggregation in agricultural applications. This efficient data aggregation hybrid protocol is based on Rapid Spanning Tree and Cluster Head routing which has an advantage of faster convergence during self organization and a topology change, thereby minimizing the energy consumed. Further, this hybrid protocol uses clustering within the clusters and chooses cluster-heads; cluster-head is responsible for receiving, sending and maintaining information in its cluster. Then all cluster-heads will construct a spanning tree to establish the communication with the sink. The simulation using ns-2 confirms the faster convergence and reduced energy consumption with heterogeneous sensor nodes.