Development of field sensor network system with infrared radiation sensors

Abstract

Information technology has been focused to estimate growth degree of plants in agriculture. This paper focuses on leaf temperature that changes according to the activity of photosynthesis. Infrared cameras are a major method to measure leaf temperature in conventional methods. However, the expensive device price causes difficulty to install many sensors in practical fields. Infrared radiation sensors are new candidate device to estimate growth state by measuring leaf temperature. Since the price of infrared radiation sensors is inexpensive, we can install a lot of sensors into fields. Additionally, the consumed power of infrared radiation sensors is relatively small comparing to Infrared cameras. These features of infrared radiation sensors are appropriate for sensor networks working with a battery. This paper proposes a field sensor network to measure growth state of plants by infrared radiation sensors. Our goal is to realize a practical and inexpensive sensor network system with typical system on chip (SoC). Therefore, we employ a reasonable price SoC supporting IEEE 802.15.4 standard to design a unique device with various sensors. In order to realize multi-hop communication with low-power consumption, we propose a routing and media access control mechanisms for the developed system. The media access control technology realizes periodic sleep operation of all devices to enable long-term operation of the system. The routing control technology can construct a multi-hop network with the minimum number of hops. The experimental results demonstrated that the development system works in the practical fields.