Development of Multi-hop Field Sensor Networks with Arduino Board

Wireless sensor networks have been focused to enhance agricultural production because environmental information is useful to estimate growing conditions of plants, diseases of plants etc. A density of sensors is also an important factor to obtain an accurate estimation. Therefore, a lot of sensors are required in a practical field sensing. In conventional systems, the number of sensors is limited due to a cost of an installation and management. Additionally, their devices typically use a single-hop communication. Hence, it is difficult to cover a larger area due to the limit of a communication distance. This paper proposes a wireless sensor network for agricultural usages. The proposed protocols for the wireless sensor network can work with a limited memory resource and CPU performance. Therefore, a developed system can employ Arduino micro-computer boards that have a limited hardware resource. Since a price of Arduino boards is usually inexpensive, it is easy to deploy a lot of sensors in a field to improve an accuracy of estimation. Additionally, our network supports multi-hop communication to extend a sensing area. It also supports a sleep operation at all nodes to mitigate consumed power even if typical multi-hop routing protocols do not support a sleep operation at relay nodes. Experimental results show that the developed sensor network can construct a multi-hop network by the proposed protocols, and work well on a resource constrained hardware.