Energy-Efficient Network Protocol for Precision Agriculture By Sonam Maurya and Vinod Kumar Jain image licensed by ingram publishing W ireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an emerging technology for precision agriculture. This article details a periodic threshold sensitive hybrid routing protocol for precision agriculture. The proposed protocol uses region-based static clustering approaches for deploying sensor nodes, which provide efficient coverage to the entire agricultural area. Deploying heterogeneous types of nodes in different regions as per their performing task and energy level provides a better solution for the coverage-hole problem. The sensor nodes deployed in the network sense the environment parameter continuously, but the sensed data acquired about the environmental factor of the agricultural area is transmitted to the base station (BS) only when the user-defined periodic timer (PT) or sensed attributes value exceeds the desired threshold. These user-defined thresholds for data transmission reduce the packet-transmission rate to a BS and prolongs the network lifetime. In the proposed protocol, hybrid routing is used for data transmission, where some deployed sensors use the direct-data-transmission technique, while others use the fuzzy-based clustering technique for transmitting data to the BS. Thus, the proposed threshold sensitive hybrid routing technique minimizes the overall energy consumption of sensor nodes. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE WSNs have been an important contribution to precision agriculture. Therefore, the new WSNs technologies must be Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2017.2684960 Date of publication: 14 June 2017 42 IEEE ConsumEr Consumer ElECtronICs Electronics magazInE Magazine ^ july 2017 2162-2248/17©2017IEEE