Power Efficient and Long Range Precision Agriculture Monitoring System

Precision agriculture, also referred to as precision farming or smart farming, uses technology to improve the efficiency, sustainability and productivity of agricultural practices. Traditional precision agriculture systems often suffer from limited communication range and high power consumption, which restrict their scalability and long term deployment in large scale farms. Furthermore, existing literature lacks integrated solutions that address both range extension and power minimization in precision agriculture monitoring. To bridge this gap, multiple power efficient soil moisture monitoring nodes are deployed in the farm which transmit data using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. Also, this paper investigates the power consumption of the entire precision agriculture monitoring system, including both the sensor nodes and the gateway, which has not been addressed in the previous research works. Soil moisture node has a battery lifetime of 114.18 hrs with 620 mAh / 3V battery. The soil moisture data is received by the gateway (receiver) which then sends data to the cloud. Also, Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is used at the receiver which reduces the packet loss and increases the range of soil moisture monitoring nodes. Additionally, light intensity (VCNL4040), anemometer, temperature and humidity (SHT40) sensors are interfaced with the gateway which sends data to the cloud directly using Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) technology. Therefore, this paper proposes novel and power-efficient agricultural monitoring device that also acts as a gateway has a battery life of 106.74 hrs with 15600 mAh / 4.2 V battery. Additionally, the mean absolute errors calculated for the soil moisture sensor (ZSSC3123), VCNL4040, SHT40 and anemometer using reference sensors are 0.1, 1.9, 1.33 and 1.42 respectively.