Wireless sensor actor networks

Abstract

Recent advances in science and technology have led to facilitate monitoring the environment, collecting data, processing the sensed data, threshold-decision making process and lastly performing of suitable actions by using of distributed wireless sensor network and actor network. Wireless sensor actor network (WSAN) composed of a combination of at least one coordinator node with sensors and actor nodes that communicate wirelessly to perform a specified sensing, monitoring and actuation tasks. These technologies of sensing and acting are very promising in many fields such as agriculture and environment monitoring. Greenhouses fused with WSANs for crops mentoring and climate parameters control provides effective solution for enhance crops growth and prevent diseases. This paper explores WSAN definition, uniqueness and the main design concepts and applications. A detail exploring of agriculture applications has been presented. WSAN contributions for agricultural applications also have been presented. © 2011 IEEE.