Design and Evaluation of a Low Energy Bluetooth Sensor Node for Animal Monitoring

New trends and advancements in communication and sensing technologies in Precision Farming (PF) offer opportunities to farmers for a continuous and real-time monitoring applications, which are mainly based on the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Animal monitoring and supervision is one critical aspect in PF, where various types of sensing and control systems are employed. However, available solutions for animal monitoring portrait a compromise between performance and system efficiency in terms of energy consumption, memory allocation, hardware size, and cost. In this work, an energy-efficient, lightweight, and cost effective wireless sensor node for animal monitoring is designed. The designed system is compact and small in size with a dimension of 26×33 mm. During its active state, the current consumption of the designed sensor node using ADXL is in the range from 3 to 9 mA at a sampling frequency of 12 Hz.