A Wireless Sensor Network for Cropland Environmental Monitoring

Wireless sensor network technology can provide optimal and integrated solution for distributed data collecting, delivering and analyzing in tough croplands environment. A wireless sensor network for cropland environmental monitoring is designed according to cropland application requirements. It consists of a set of sensor nodes for data sensing, a sink node for data aggregating and long-distance transmitting, and a base station for data storing and analyzing. In order to make sure of reliable communication performance, we have conducted radio propagation experiments in actual crop field. Antenna height is proven to be an important factor to propagation loss. Therefore, the lowest antenna height for cropland applications is discussed. Finally, we proposed regular patterns of sensor nodes deployment based on the communication range and the sampling range.