Design, Implementation, and Field Experimentation of a Long-Lived Multi-hop Sensor Network for Vineyard Monitoring

Precision agriculture can particularly benefit from wireless sensor networks, as they allow continuous and fine-grained monitoring of environmental data, which can thus be used to reduce management costs and improve crop quality. Such applications typically require long-term and unattended monitoring of large geographical areas. Therefore, sensor nodes must be able to self-organize and use their limited energy budget very efficiently, so as to prolong the network lifetime to many months or, even, years. In this chapter we present ASLEEP, an adaptive strategy for efficient power management in multi-hop WSNs targeted to periodic data collection. The proposed strategy dynamically adjusts the active periods of nodes to match the network demands with the minimum energy expenditure. In this chapter we focus on the implementation and the experimental evaluation of ASLEEP on a real testbed deployed in a vineyard, according to the case study considered in the project. We show that our adaptive approach actually reduces the energy consumption of sensor nodes, thus increasing the network lifetime up to several years.