mKRISHI wireless sensor network platform for precision agriculture

The paper presents a mKRISHI sensor network platform which is specifically designed to build a low cost wireless sensor network for precision agriculture applications. The Texas Instrument's CC2530, which is an IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee compliant system-on-chip, has been used to provide a long range communication while making the sensor nodes more power efficient. The design and development of gateway has been also presented which connects the wireless sensor network to the back-haul network. The enclosure of the sensor node has been designed using the inexpensive PVC pipes which makes the entire solution more cost effective and feasible for the deployment in the outdoor environments like agriculture farms. It has been shown through the experiments that there is not significant attenuation in the received signal strength due to the enclosure using PVC pipes. The results obtained from the deployment of the sensor network over a period of two months has been presented to show the robustness of the proposed framework.