Telemetry and communication systems for irrigation management

Abstract

The development of wireless communication systems for agricultural and irrigation applications has enabled farm managers to access real-time data from in-field sensors to improve on-farm operations. Recent research into wireless sensor networks for agriculture has focussed on reducing the power consumption and manual configuration of the nodes by the end-user, while commercial wireless sensor networks use short-range transceivers such as Zigbee or long-range transceivers such as UHF citizen band radio. However, the research wireless sensor networks often experienced reduced reliability under field conditions. Therefore, this project aims to design a telemetry system with a focus on reliability under field conditions.