Wireless sensor network coverage measurement and planning in mixed crop farming

Wireless sensor network technology holds great promise for application in a wide range of areas, both to monitor and control a variety of systems. Whilst the use of sensors has found natural applications within the manufacturing sector, application in agriculture is still in its infancy and has been used largely to only monitor the environment. The use of technology in the agricultural sector to improve crop yield, quality and to foster sustainable agriculture can be regarded as one of the areas that will provide food security to the expanding global population and to mitigate food shortage precipitated by unpredictable weather patterns. This paper presents a Wireless Sensor Network coverage measurements in a mixed crop farming, modeling and deployment architecture taking into account the different signal propagation scenarios and attenuation factor of different crops. Most importantly, the paper presents wireless sensor network deployment architecture for a mixed crop trial field over an area of 54,432m2 , which is 4% of the total area to be covered by the final network.