A Wireless Sensor Network for Feedlot Animal Health Monitoring

Cattle health monitoring on the feedlot is a crucial but nontrivial task. The conventional way of monitoring relies heavily on the cowboy's visual surveillance, which makes the animal monitoring quality highly subjective and correlated with the obviousness of the observed traits. In order to achieve early detection of each individual animal's illness, in this paper, a wireless sensor network system is developed to monitor the animal's feeding and drinking behaviors. A directional antenna is used to allow one router to monitor multiple animals simultaneously, and an energy efficient mesh routing strategy is proposed to aggregate the monitoring data. The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated through numerical analysis and simulations. The contributions of this paper lie in the novelty and feasibility of using directional antenna and wireless sensor network technologies for feedlot animal health monitoring.