Towards Precision Agriculture: Building a Soil Wetness Multi-Hop WSN from First Principles

This work presents the design and implementation of a wireless sensor network (WSN) from first principles, i.e. without the use of commercial WSN platforms. Specifically, a modular multi-hop WSN was built for humidity, temperature and soil wetness measurements, towards precision agriculture applications. We describe the modules developed for radio communication, low-cost sensing, relaying and storing, and compare the developed hardware with state-of-the-art WSN transceivers and sensors. Furthermore, we briefly describe an outdoor demonstration of the developed, multi-hop, soil wetness WSN. This work provides a concrete demonstration example towards precision agriculture and could potentially assist students, researchers and practitioners to develop their own customized platforms, without dependence on commercial WSN platforms.