Sensor Nodes Placement for Farmland Environmental Monitoring Applications

Sensor nodes placement is especially important for farmland environmental monitoring applications, in which crop growing causes non-static environment for radio propagation. In order to make sure of reliable communication performance, we have conducted radio propagation experiments in crop field. The results showed pass loss of radio propagation over a 2.4GHz frequency band at each height could be described by the log-distance path loss model. And antenna height is proven to be an important factor to propagation loss. The lowest antenna height for farmland applications is given in our studies. In addition, sensor nodes deployment is discussed in order to satisfy the requirements of farmland continuous phenomenon monitoring. Regular patterns of sensor nodes deployment based on the communication range and the sampling range was proposed and discussed.