Distributed Monitoring Systems for Agriculture based onWireless Sensor Network Technology

The adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for wide area environmental monitoring is currently considered one of the most challenging application scenarios for this emerging technology. The promise of an unmanaged, selfconfiguring and self-powered wireless infrastructure, with a continuously decreasing cost per unit, attracts the attention of both final users and system integrators, replacing previously deployed wired solutions and opening new business opportunities. Agricultural scenarios seem to be one of the most promising application areas for WSN due to the necessity of improving the agro-food production chain in terms of precision and quality. This involves a careful system design, since a rural scenario consists of an extensive area devoid of an electrical power supply and availabile wired connections. This paper shows and describes a practical case study, starting from a real problem and reaching the best architectural solutions with particular focus on hardware implementation and communication protocol design. Moreover, encouraging and unprecedented results are shown, achieved with this approach and supported by several pilot sites in different vineyards throughout Italy and France. Finally, the commercial system ”VineSense”, born from previous experimental solutions, and its agronomic results are also presented.