PotatoScanner - A Mobile Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Node for Smart Farming Applications

Smart Farming has the goal to support farmers in their various activities, i.e., achieve best results in quality and quantity of their products, with low and efficient resource usage, working in sustainable manners etc. For that, a lot of information is needed, e.g., about the current state of the monitored agricultural area. Typically this requires a large number of sensors which collect important sensor data at predefined intervals. For further evaluation such data is usually processed in a central place, for which it must first be transferred from the field to a data sink at the farm premises. Cellular networks could be used for such data transmissions, but the network deployment in rural areas is costly with less likely revenues. Thus, mobile operators are not eager to roll out their networks in rural areas so that they are often not well covered. In this paper we introduce PotatoScanner, a mobile Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Node (DTWSN) that closes this gap and acts with the help of a field sprayer as a data mule for the collected data. In addition, PotatoScanner itself has sensors to obtain further information about the cultivated field. The paper provides an overview of the overall system and analyses the measurement data obtained in real operation over the past two years 2017 and 2018.