Development of an Effective Routing Protocol for Cluster Based Wireless Sensor Network for Soil Moisture Deficit Monitoring

Abstract

The use of wireless sensor networks in agriculture is anticipated to revolutionalise its operational mechanism. Many activities like moisture deficit monitoring, crop yield estimation and soil erosion can be automated using sensors. However, we need to develop deployment strategies, routing schemes appropriate for such applications. This paper focuses on special case of irrigated agriculture in gravity and pressurised irrigation. We have formulated a deployment strategy and developed an efficient routing protocol LATHAR (Location aware Threshold Based Hierarchical and Adaptive Routing) for transmitting the data packets from sensor node to the access point. The protocol has been tested on simulation model developed in ns2 simulator and it has been found to perform best in almost all the matrices used to evaluate the performance of WSN. © 2015 SERSC.