Development of a smart irrigation monitoring system employing the wireless sensor network for agricultural water management

This article presents a 'smart irrigation monitoring system' (SIMS) solution through a wireless connection, which can monitor the whole agricultural land and provide the optimal water supply to the crops. The system utilizes weather data from an automatic weather station, moisture sensor readings, and a Raspberry Pi coordinator node. By combining moisture sensor data with the crop water requirement, the system estimates the actual irrigation needs and automatically controls the water pump, turning it ON/OFF as required. The irrigation is provided according to forecasted upcoming rainfall events. The overall system also considered the evapotranspiration rate in wheat crops. This approach, unique in its real-time monitoring of soil moisture and temperature in agricultural fields, provides effective water resource management for farmers. The study includes hardware and software design of various IoT-based components (i.e., capacitive soil moisture sensor, wireless sensing nodes (iNODE), edge computing, and cloud computing). The distributed network incorporates DS18B20 soil temperature and PCB-based capacitive soil moisture sensors using the communication module XBee S2C protocol, which sends real-time soil parameters to an edge server for irrigation control. Moreover, the developed system proves to be a cost-effective solution in terms of time and financial resources.