Towards a smart irrigation system based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs)

Abstract

Due to the evolution of technologies and need to observe and manage hostile environments, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming essential and implicated in most fields of life. The agricultural sector is one of such sectors where WSNs are successfully utilized to achieve many benefits. For successful agriculture, the irrigation is one of the most important factors, where it plays a tactical role in the process of agriculture but is considered one of the world's largest freshwater consumers. Besides, the water scarcity, drought, and irrational wastage of water resources are among the critical issues that touch almost all sectors, notably agricultural services, and especially irrigation. These facts lead all governments around the world to rethink about saving water and reducing the amount of water used in irrigation; this requires the development of irrigation practices in order to obtain a complete and independent system for the management of irrigation more efficient. Consequently, selection of using WSNs in irrigation system will be a benefit for developing the agriculture, and thus saving water and improving and increasing production. In this work, we propose a new model of a complete and smart irrigation system based on wireless sensor networks, and we introduce and discuss our proposed system. The suggested system controls and regulates irrigation system by monitoring a set of environmental parameters, i.e., soil and weather properties, using soil and weather sensor nodes and improving techniques of decision-making to estimate requirements of each crop (e.g., amount of water required), and therefore can make the decision to activate or disable irrigation.