New Paradigm for Beehive Monitoring System Using Infrared and Power Line Communication

In recent years, smart beehive monitoring has attracted attention due to its highly profitable industry. However, colony collapse disorder (CCD) syndrome, which is described by the sudden disappearance of the bee colony, severely affects the honey bee industry in most countries of the world. The causes of CCD are not verified, but electromagnetic interference (EMI) is the possible one that appears in most beehive monitoring systems. Based on this motivation, this paper presents a new paradigm for beehive monitoring utilizing the proposed system consisting of a host module, multiple sensor modules, and relay modules. Each sensor module is responsible for collecting the in-hive parameters of each beehive such as temperature, humidity, hive weight, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and entrance counts. The collected sensor data are then transmitted to the relay module by infrared (IR) communication to avoid EMI. The relay module integrates the IR receiver and power line communication (PLC) transmitter technologies, where the former is used to receive optical signals with in-hive parameters, and the latter is used to transform the abovementioned signals into PLC interface. Moreover, a host module is introduced to aim at receiving the signals from multiple relay modules by the PLC interface. The distances of IR communication and PLC are determined through simulation results under the target bit error rate of $10^{-3}$ to provide accurate in-hive parameters with negligible interference from multiple beehives. Experimental results also show that the proposed system could meet the requirements of real-time and long-term data collection and transmission.