A wireless sensor network platform optimized for assisted sustainable agriculture

The paper illustrates an efficient wireless sensor network platform, suitable for application to assisted agriculture in (but not only in) developing Countries and remote regions. The platform has been conceived in order to minimize power consumption, during all the phases of data acquisition, sampling, and compression, with an efficient and performing communication protocol, with extended transmission range and radio coverage optimization. Sensor nodes have been provided with energy harvesting facilities, to avoid any need for direct power supply or battery replacement. The resulting nodes are consequently autonomous, easy to locate and relocate, and scalable. A further work has been done to minimize dimensions and costs, in order to deploy capillary installations. Furthermore, thanks to the work done from the side of the channel optimization, it has been possible to acquire not only standard environmental parameters, but also high definition pictures. Images of plants, trees, as well as fruits and leaves are taken every hour, and forwarded to a central gateway, interfaced with the Internet. A team of agronomists and biologists checks the state of the cultivation from remote, providing the farmer with continuous assistance at a reasonable cost. This is extremely important in Developing Countries, taking into account that in those locations experts cannot reach the fields and cannot provide the farmer with specialized, continuous consultancy, both for economical and logistic reasons. In a global scenario, where new diseases arise rapidly and continuously, the remote assistance provided by an expert can minimize farmer's risks to loose his harvest and reduce his revenues. The set of environmental parameters, together with the visual collection of cultivation conditions, is useful also to generate a culture database, particularly useful in developing regions, where there is almost never historical recorded trace, in particular about possible associated diseases and infections. Last but not least, the platform allows a significant improvement of the sustainability. Thanks to the assistance of the agronomist, the farmer can minimize the use of pesticides and chemicals, as well as reducing the number of additional treatments, resulting in significant advantages, in terms of production costs and organic quality.