Climatic Parameters and Vegetation Effect on Wireless Routing Pattern in Greenhouse

Abstract

One of the promising areas where wireless sensor network (WSN) application would be essential is in precision farming, especially those involving high value crops. Understanding the behavior of the signal propagates in such environment would be crucial in optimizing the wireless sensor nodes deployment. This paper discusses the experimental implementation of wireless sensor network in mango greenhouse and the effect of climatic parameters and vegetation on the routing pattern of the nodes. The results show that the number of hops increases as an effect of variation in climatic parameters. Nevertheless, the changes in temperature alone do not seem to affect the changes in the pattern of signals routed in the greenhouse significantly contrary to the changes in humidity level. As humidity level decreases, the number of signal routing increases, thus showing more chaotic routing pattern. The presence of vegetation around the nodes helps to preserve humidity level, thus increasees the creation of low cost path for signal to be undertaken, which in the end added to the number of signal hops.