Wireless sensor networks: a review of motes, wireless technologies, routing algorithms and static deployment strategies for agriculture applications

From the last few decades, a lot of research work has been conducted to develop wireless sensor networks (WSN) for wide variety of applications such as agriculture and environment monitoring, healthcare, military applications etc. Nowadays, the academicians and researchers are working on resolving various research issues in this technology domain. A few of the research issues faced by researchers’ are designing low cost and low power motes, network topologies, deployment strategies, and energy efficient data routing protocols. A lot of research has already been done in each of the mentioned areas individually but only a few research articles or literature discusses research work about two or more areas collectively. The existing literature explores the simulation work only and a few has given the description of complete design, development and deployment of a WSN. This paper presents the detailed discussion in form of literature review of each aspect of WSN design starting from mote design and ending to associated application. Since a lot of applications are using WSNs for monitoring purpose, this paper focuses on one of the most crucial application for livelihood i.e. crop production or agriculture domain.