09-09-2017, 02:34 PM
Today Wireless Sensor Network are used in a growing number of commercial solutions, with the aim of implementing distributed monitoring and control system in a large number of different application areas. In particular, the agricultural scenario appears to be one of the most promising fields of application for WSN due to the need to test the agricultural production chain in terms of accuracy and quality. This implies a careful design of the system, since the requirements are very strict: maximizing battery life, robustness, recovery strategies, network flexibility and reconfigurability. This work shows and describes a case study, starting from a real problem and reaching the best architectural solution, with special attention to hardware implementation and communication protocol design. A complete end-to-end solution has been implemented: several wireless nodes send environmental data every 15 minutes to a master node connected to a GPRS gateway card that forwards the data to a remote server using the standard TCP-IP protocol. The encouraging and unprecedented results achieved by this approach are supported by several pilot sites in different vineyards in Italy and France where a large amount of environmental data has been collected and analyzed for two and a half years.