Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019 - 57

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algorithm, which is mainly based on three phases: Nodes
localization, clustering, and data transmission. This paper is
organized as following: Section "ENERGY-EFFICIENT
TECHNIQUES FOR WSNS IN AGRICULTURE"
offers an overview of energy-efficient techniques for
WSNs in agricultural applications. In Section "PROPOSED
ROUTING ALGORITHM FOR AGRICULTURAL
APPLICATION," the routing algorithm is detailed.
Section "PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND REAL
IMPLEMENTATION" illustrates a performance evaluation, where some experimental results are discussed.

ENERGY-EFFICIENT TECHNIQUES FOR WSNS IN
AGRICULTURE
Wireless sensor networks offer an interesting solution for
problems related to farming resources optimization, decision making support, and land monitoring. They offer
real-time information about the changes in the field and
about the state of crops and make the harvest better
through precision farming (see Figure 1).
The proposed architecture of the agriculture monitoring system offers a complete overview of the deployed system, where critical information collected from the field are
efficiently communicated between installed nodes. Based
on this architecture, nodes are randomly deployed. Then, a
clustering algorithm is carried out to organize these nodes
into different clusters with consideration of their initial
energy. Each cluster contains a cluster head (CH) node,
with a predefined position, and a number of normal nodes.
Thus, two types of communication topologies are observed
between installed nodes: Intracluster communication
between CHs from different clusters and intercluster
communication between nodes within the same cluster.
MARCH 2019

Accordingly, all information is collected in the base station
(BS) and then forwarded to a network gateway. At this
point, further data processing and decision making are
applied, such as localization, routing sensing, and data networking. Once necessary decisions are defined, obtained
results are communicated again to installed nodes in the
network. Therefore, an increasing number of communicated data packet is created, which increases both the
energy consumption of the deployed nodes and, thus,
affects the energy balance of the network.
In fact, the major challenge is to develop low-cost,
low-powered components resilient to failures with simple
operation and high reliability. Therefore, many studies
focused on reducing battery depletion by proposing
energy-efficient solutions. Generally, the existing energyefficient schemes in agricultural applications can be classified into two categories, namely, power reduction techniques and energy harvesting techniques (see Figure 2).
These techniques can also be classified into subcategories
to explore the power consumption problem of WSNs systems in agriculture.
In large-scale networks, the distribution of nodes may
have a high variation of network density. This has a big
impact on energy consumption for communication. The
nonstructured transmissions and receptions lead to high
power waste. This is why, routes between nodes should be
well optimized and monitored. The packets scheduling and
their circulation within the network should be addressed in
the wireless communication. Thus, finding the best path to
the destination provides a balanced distribution of the
power loss between nodes. Therefore, the better the routing
is realized, the less energy consumed. Implementing routing
protocols in WSNs is very challenging.
Cluster-based routing protocols are introduced as
energy-efficient network protocol. Generally, it consists

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Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019

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