Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture: Cattle Monitoring for Farming Industries

This paper investigates an adaptation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to cattle monitoring application. The proposed solution facilitates a desired requirement of continuously assessing the condition of individual animal, aggregating and reporting these data to the farm manager. There are several existing approaches to animal monitoring, from using a store and forward mechanisms to employing a GSM technique. These approaches for monitoring livestock health can only provide sporadic information and introduce a considerable cost in staffing and physical hardware. The core of this study is to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks by using alternative low cost, low power consumption sensor nodes, which are capable of providing real-time communications at a reasonable hardware cost. In this paper, the hardware and software have been carefully designed to provide early indication of possible outbreaks while conforming to WSNs’ stringent limitations.