A wireless sensor network based low cost and energy efficient frame work for precision agriculture

Agriculture happens to be the key source of livelihood for more or less every occupant in developing country including India. Agriculture by and large determines the economic growth of nation and is known to be its backbone. It is due to the population explosion, which resulted in disproportion of demand/ supply ratio for agricultural products. To satisfy ever increasing demand for agricultural products, either the agricultural productivity has to be nearly doubled or the methods used in traditional agriculture have to modified in a way that would cut short the wastage of agricultural resources to nearly half. The proposed framework for precision agriculture employs low cost environmental sensors, an Arduino Uno prototyping board and a pair of wireless transceivers (XBee ZB S2) along with actuating circuit to provide automated irrigation and monitoring of crops. The proposed prototype uses XBee protocol which is based on ZigBee technology and is built over IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The important characteristics of ZigBee technology favorable for precision agriculture are; low data rate, low power consumption and larger coverage area. Thus, due to aforesaid characteristics, ZigBee technology happens to be the first choice for implementing precision agriculture. The prototype developed not only provides real time monitoring of crops by sensing parameters like temperature, humidity and moisture content of the soil which are essentially required for the healthy growth of the crops but also provides automated irrigation. It also uses the resources only when demanded by the crops and that too in right quantity, thereby reducing the resource wastage.