Energy Aware Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Agricultural Monitoring: A Deep Q-Network Based Framework

Instead of earlier traditional farming, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be effectively used in the precision agriculture to improve the farmer’s livelihood. Whereas, hierarchical routing based protocols in WSNs are beneficial in agricultural monitoring as the network transmission load towards the sink is reduced. It decreases the energy requirement for routing the data. Following this, a deep Q-network (DQN) based energy aware multi-path routing of data towards the sink node in the WSNs is proposed in this paper. It improves the energy efficiency of sensor nodes, which in turn can eventually increase the network lifetime. Employing the proposed energy efficient routing technique, effective monitoring of the soil-moisture data in an agricultural field is taken into account. Initially, the soil moisture data from different depths of an agricultural field is collected, and it is then forwarded to an aggregator node. The principle component analysis is used for the data aggregation to obtain accurate correlated data with low power requirements. Finally, the aggregated data is routed from the aggregator node to the network gateway via the sink nodes in an energy efficient manner. The proposed DQN based routing uses the Q-table to store the Q-values for different state-action pairs. The high and positive Q-value of DQN is determined by the selection of better state-action pair. Various simulation results show that 3% saving of average residual energy is obtained by the proposed work over the existing approaches, which leads in approximately 12% increased network lifetime to route the data. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.