Energy efficient routing algorithms for application to agro-food wireless sensor networks

Precision Agriculture (PA) represents a novel paradigm for managing the agro-food production, by monitoring the physical parameters of different farming zones. This might be pursued by means of different communication infrastructures, but the most promising technology seems to be the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). However, merely applying this approach to the PA context, while resulting in a more flexible communication platform, still exhibits rigid information management architecture. Applying the Ambient Intelligent (AmI) paradigm to create an environment highly interactive with all the users involved in the process, can overcame this limitation. Our proposal deals with the porting of the Ami concepts on a highly-integrated WSN platform with a special focus on the routing strategies. In particular, we investigate a class of dynamic flooding algorithm aware of the neighbor nodes status in terms of geographical position and residual battery charge. By comparing this approach with the gossiping and the static flooding schemes we are able to highlight a remarkable improvement in the network life-time with a particular regard to the most solicited nodes, without complexity increasing.