Drip Irrigation System using Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, adopting an optimized irrigation system has become a necessity due to the lack of the world water resource. Moreover, many researchers have treated this issue to improve the irrigation system by coupling the novel technologies from the information and communication field with the agricultural practices. The Wireless Sensor and Actuators Networks (WSANs) present a great example of this fusion. In this paper, we present a model architecture for a drip irrigation system using the WSANs. Our model includes the soil moisture, temperature and pressure sensors to monitor the irrigation operations. Specifically, we take into account the case where a system malfunction occurs, as when the pipes burst or the emitters block. Also, we differentiate two main traffic levels for the information transmitted by the WSAN, and we use an adequate priority-based routing protocol to achieve high QoS performance. Simulations conducted over the NS-2 simulator show promising results in terms of delay and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), mainly for the priority traffic.