Luca Bencini

Agricultural Monitoring Based on Wireless Sensor Network Technology: Real Long Life Deployments for Physiology and Pathogens Control

Today Wireless Sensor Network are used into an increasing number of commercial solutions, aimed at implementing distributed monitoring and control system in a great number of different application area. In particular the agricultural scenario seems to be one of the most promising application area for WSN due to the necessity of proving the agricultural production chain in terms of precision and quality. This involves a careful system design, since requirements are very strict: battery life-time maximization,robustness, recovery strategies, network flexibility and reconfigurability. This paper shows and describes a practical case study, starting from a real problem and reaching the best architectural solution, with particular focus on the hardware implementation and communication protocol design. A real 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 board that forwards data to a remote server using TCP-IP standard protocol. The encouraging and unprecedented results achieved by this approach are supported by several pilot sites into different vineyard in Italy and in France, within which a great amount of environmental data have been collected and analyzed since two years and half.

A real-time traffic monitoring based on wireless sensor network technologies

Non intrusive systems-based traffic monitoring, is a paradigm for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Real time systems capable of providing prompt information, like loop detectors, laser/radar systems and video cameras, were proposed in the past but they are affected by some straits in deployment. In this paper a Traffic Monitoring Wireless Sensor Network system (TM-WSN), based on acoustic arrays and powered by effective post-processing, is proposed. The system is composed by an hierarchical scheme of Master Nodes and Sensor Nodes linked with a multi-hop protocol. Key features are traffic monitoring and queue detection to be performed in real-time at unprecedented space scale.

Development of Wireless Sensor Networks for Agricultural Monitoring

The concept of precision agriculture has been around for some time now. Blackmore et al., in 1994 [1] defined it as a comprehensive system designed to optimize agricultural production by carefully tailoring soil and crop management to correspond to the unique condition found in each field while maintaining environmental quality. The early adopters during that time found precision agriculture to be unprofitable and the instances in which it was implemented were few and far between. Further, the high initial investment in the form of electronic equipment for sensing and communication meant that only large farms could afford it.

Wireless Sensor Networks for On-Field Agricultural Management Process

Agriculture is one of the most ancient activities of man in which innovation and technology are usually accepted with difficulty, unless real and immediate solutions are found for specific problems or for improving production and quality. Nevertheless, a new approach of gathering information from the environment could represent an important step towards high quality and eco-sustainable agriculture. Nowadays, irrigation, fertilization and pesticides management are often left to the farmer’s and agronomist’s discretion: common criteria used to guarantee safe culture and plant growth are often giving a greater amount of chemicals and water than necessary. There is no direct feedback between the decision of treating or irrigating plants and the real effects in the field. Plant conditions are usually committed to sporadic and faraway weather stations that cannot provide accurate and local measurements of the fundamental parameters in each zone of the field. Also, agronomic models, based on these monitored data, cannot provide reliable information. On the contrary, agriculture needs detailed monitoring in order to obtain real time feedback between plants, local climate conditions and man’s decisions. The concept of precision agriculture has been around for some time now. Blackmore et al., in 1994 (Blackmore, 1994) defined it as a comprehensive system designed to optimize agricultural production by carefully tailoring soil and crop management to correspond to the unique condition found in each field while maintaining environmental quality. The early adopters during that time found precision agriculture to be unprofitable and the instances in which it was implemented were few and far between. Further, the high initial investment in the form of electronic equipment for sensing and communication meant that only large farms could afford it. The technologies proposed at this point comprised three aspects: Remote Sensing (RS), Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS). RS coupled with GPS coordinates produced accurate maps and models of the agricultural fields. The sampling was typically through electronic sensors such as soil probes and remote optical scanners from satellites. The collection of such data in the form of electronic computer databases gave birth to the GIS. Statistical analyses were then conducted on the data and the variability of agricultural land was charted with respect to its properties. The technology, apart from being 1

An Energy Efficient Cross Layer Solution Based on Smart Antennas for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless Sensor Network deployment currently represents an affordable solution to some challenging application areas. This involves a careful system design with particular regard to the communications and control protocols. In the following, the benefits of adopting directive antennas, both in terms of energy saving and targets tracking are presented by integrating this feature into a novel MAC protocol (MD-STAR). Simulation results are also deeply provided, underlining higher performance of MD-STAR with respect to existing solutions, for different directive main lobe width and node density values.

Analytical Model for Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF Mechanism in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks

Wireless mesh networks suffer of scalability problems when the number of nodes grows. To solve this issue, wireless mesh networks with multi-interface nodes were introduced. In such networks it is possible to use multiple channels to implement spatial reuse of frequencies. These solutions offer a huge throughput performance improvement but they increase the complexity due to the need of implementing a selection interface policy. One of the most simple interface selection policy is random choice. In this paper we provide an analytical analysis of the Uniform Random Interface Selection strategy applied in a 802.11 DCF multi-radio network. Then we also present a set of performance results for the throughput and discard probability in function of the number of nodes and the number of interfaces.

An Embedded Wireless Sensor Network System for Cultural Heritage Monitoring

The adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) for real time monitoring is currently considered one of the most challenging application scenario for this emerging technology. The promise of an unmanaged infrastructure, with a continuously decreasing cost per unit, attracts the attention of both final users and system integrator, opening new business opportunities. In Europe the necessity of preventing the deterioration of art and artifacts through control of the environment in storage and exhibition opens a novel application field for WSN. This involves a careful system design, since the application and the technology requirements are very strict. This paper describes a practical case study, starting from a real problem and reaching the best architectural solution with particular focus on the hardware implementation and communication protocol design. Finally, some tests and their results are presented to highlight the effectiveness and accurateness of the developed system.

Advanced Distributed Monitoring System for Agriculture based on Wireless Sensor Network Technology

Nowadays the precision farming concept is often related to new technologies, developed to give detailed information to improve farming production, while preserving the surrounding environment from a rash use of water and pesticides.

Performance evaluation of an IEEE 802.11g mesh network with multiradio nodes

Wireless mesh networks are usually formed by self-organized nodes and characterized by high reliability and modularity, low-cost deployment, and easiness of reconfigurability. In order to improve wireless mesh network performance, several approaches have been recently proposed. Among them, one promising solution seems to be the multiradio interface approach where nodes forming the mesh network are equipped with more than one radio interface. The aim of this paper is to provide an IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function analytical model to study the behavior of single-hop multi-interface mesh networks in which nodes use a uniform random interface selection strategy to identify the radio interface to be used. The accuracy of the proposed analytical approach is validated by comparing analytical predictions with simulation results under actual conditions. Copyright

A fault tolerant communication architecture supporting critical monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper deals with an integrated MAC and Routing protocol, able to manage faults occurring in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). To this end, the protocol design has been inspired by the cross-layer principle to minimize both the signaling overhead and power consumption. After an accurate functional characterization, the performance is presented for the most relevant figures (recovering efficiency and latency, as well as the length of established end-to-end paths). The satisfactory results suggest the application to more complex scenarios where the nodes mobility is allowed.