Monitoring a Rice Field with a Low-Cost Wireless Sensor Network

Precision agriculture enables significant productivity increases, as well as enable to anticipate or reduce risks. In this paper, we propose to monitor a rice field with a low-cost architecture. The architecture is based on a low-cost wireless sensor network, composed of static sensors in the field and mobile sensors carried by farmers working in the field. The data from the static sensor is first uploaded to the mobile sensors and then uploaded to the sink (located in the village). Mobile sensors also exchange data and can help to establish permanent connectivity between the sink and farmers in the field. We discuss several aspects of this architecture and present several related challenges in terms of sensor node hardware, network protocols, and data management. Simulation results indicate that our proposed architecture outperforms the random architecture proposed in the literature in terms of lifetime and the forwarded packets per CH.