An Intelligent Irrigation Scheduling System Using Low-Cost Wireless Sensor Network Toward Sustainable and Precision Agriculture

Agricultural irrigation developments have gained attention to improve crop yields and reduce water use. However, traditional irrigation requires excessive amounts of water and consumes high electrical energy to schedule irrigations. This paper proposes a fuzzy-based intelligent irrigation scheduling system using a low-cost wireless sensor network (WSN). The fuzzy logic system takes crop and soil water variabilities into account to adaptively schedule irrigations. The theoretical crop water stress index (CWSI) is calculated to indicate plant water status using canopy temperature, solar irradiation, and vapor pressure deficit. Furthermore, the soil moisture content obtained by a capacitive soil moisture sensor is used as a determination of water status in soil. These two variables are thus incorporated to improve the precision of the irrigation scheduling system. In the experiment, the proposed irrigation scheduling system is validated and compared with existing conventional irrigation systems to explore its performance. Implementation of this system leads to a decrease in water use by 59.61% and electrical energy consumption by 67.35%, while the crop yield increases by 22.58%. The experimental results reveal that the proposed irrigation scheduling system is effective in terms of precision irrigation scheduling and efficient regarding water use and energy consumption. Finally, the cost analysis is performed to confirm the economic benefit of the proposed irrigation scheduling system.