A Power-efficient and Delay-Sensitive Mutipath Sensor Networks Protocol for Precision Farming Deployments

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the widely utilized resources in building sustainable decision-support systems for precision agriculture (PA). Nonetheless, sensors are powered by constrained-batteries that are impracticable and costly to substitute in harsh regions like agricultural fields. Thus, PA-WSN s are energy-constrained and inclined to loss of connectivity. Therefore, both energy-saving and transmission reliability must be considered whilst designing routing protocols for PA-WSNs. In this study, we present a power-efficient and delay-sensitive multipath sensor networks protocol for precision farming deployments wherein nodes are partitioned into cluster-chain hierarchies. A representative node is elected in the chain zones to dynamically allocate different duties to the cluster heads and act as their local sinks. The data are transferred from the local sinks to the central destination over multipath with inter-flow network coding mechanisms. Simulations results disclose that our protocol outperforms related schemes in terms of the data delivery-ratios, energy-saving and latency.