Energy efficient automated control of irrigation in agriculture by using wireless sensor networks

•We propose a model that calculates quantity of water needed for irrigation.•The system efficiently manages water in cultivated fields in an automated way.•The historical data and the change on the climate values are considered.•The model uses a threshold for data collection to minimize the sensor energy. Many agricultural activities can be highly enhanced by using digital technologies. One of these activities is the regulation of the quantity of water in cultivated fields, a process which is directly interwoven with the sustainability and the productivity of crops, since insufficient or excessive irrigation may not only be obstructive, but also destructive. This paper proposes a scheme based on the collaboration of an integrated system for automated irrigation management with an advanced novel routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), named ECHERP (Equalized Cluster Head Election Routing Protocol). At its core, the proposed system aims at efficiently managing water supply in cultivated fields in an automated way. The system takes into consideration the historical data and the change on the climate values to calculate the quantity of water that is needed for irrigation. In case that the change on the collected values is above a threshold more frequent data collection is proposed to minimize the necessary quantity of water. On the other hand, in case that the change of the values is below a preset threshold then the time interval to collect data can increase to save sensor energy, leading to a prolonged sensor lifetime. The results show that network lifetime using ECHERP is improved up to 1825min and if a round is 110s the model provides energy efficiency using smaller water quantities.