VALENCIA, 24 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has proposed a new distribution strategy for soil monitoring networks, which allows irrigation to be programmed in the most efficient way possible in rural areas. Their work proposes a monitoring system that includes the architecture, the design of the nodes and an algorithm to determine irrigation needs based on FAO recommendations and sensed data.
Precision agriculture is a term that defines the management of agricultural production based on observation, data collection and subsequent action, in order to improve crop efficiency, both agronomic, environmental and economic.
This agriculture requires advanced technologies to monitor crops and optimize the use of resources to achieve, among other objectives, more efficient irrigation and, ultimately, good crop performance, the university indicated in a statement.
Among the technology that precision agriculture requires, Internet of Things (IoT) systems have great potential. Although in some areas such as rural areas its implementation is more complicated, due, among other factors, to the incidence of vegetation. In particular, soil monitoring applications can suffer from interference caused by foliage density or plant height and/or width.
For this project, the team has evaluated different wireless sensor network (WSN) deployment configurations, identifying the effects of the rural environment on the signal and the fundamental requirements for the design of these networks. In addition, they have analyzed its performance with different types of vegetation (orange orchards, bushes and grasslands) and in different locations of the Wi-Fi nodes (on the ground, near the ground and above the ground).
The professor of the Department of Communications and director of the Research Institute for the Integrated Management of Coastal Zones (IGIC) of the UPV, Jaime Lloret, has stressed that “in the work it was seen that vegetation creates high variability in areas with high density of foliage”.
“The sensors installed on the ground had more coverage problems, even with vegetation where most of the foliage is at a higher altitude. Deployments close to the ground are the best in the case of orange trees,” he explained.
However, ground and near-ground deployment strategies in orange groves showed high variability in signal quality, even without any obstacles between the sender and receiver.
“However, aspects of the rural environment and deployment that affect the signal, such as node height, crop type, foliage density or irrigation method, must be taken into account when designing a deployment WSN efficiently”, concluded Lloret.
