Smart Sensing-Enabled Decision Support System for Water Scheduling in Orange Orchard

The scarcity of water resources throughout the world demands its optimum utilization in various sectors. Smart Sensing-enabled irrigation management systems are the ideal solutions to ensure the optimum utilization of water resources in the agriculture sector. This paper presents a wireless sensor network-enabled Decision Support System (DSS) for developing a need-based irrigation schedule for the orange orchard. For efficient monitoring of various in-field parameters, our proposed approach uses the latest smart sensing technology such as soil moisture, leaf-wetness, temperature and humidity. The proposed smart sensing-enabled test-bed was deployed in the orange orchard of our institute for approximately one year and successfully adjusted its irrigation schedule according to the needs and demands of the plants. Moreover, a modified Longest Common SubSequence (LCSS) mechanism is integrated with the proposed DSS for distinguishing multi-valued noise from the abrupt changing scenarios. To resolve the concurrent communication problem of two or more wasp-mote sensor boards with a common receiver, an enhanced RTS/CTS handshake mechanism is presented. Our proposed DSS compares the most recently refined data with pre-defined threshold values for efficient water management in the orchard. Irrigation activity is scheduled if water deficit criterion is met and the farmer is informed accordingly. Both the experimental and simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better in comparison to the existing schemes.