Research On Smart Irrigation System Based On Wireless Sensor Networks

Agriculture is the lifeblood of our national economy. Water-saving irrigation has an invaluable role to agriculture. At present, the water consumption of agriculture has a growth every year, but the use efficiency of the water is low. So the advanced technology to improve agricultural productivity must be adopted. In recent years, ZigBee has a very broad outlook on the Internet of Things (IOT). Combined the advantages of ZigBee and GPRS technology, a kind of intelligent irrigation system based on wireless sensor network is designed in this paper. The wireless way removes wiring problems, and the inconvenience of traditional wired way is avoided. The timely and appropriate amount of irrigation is given to the crop, and scientific management in the process of irrigation is realized.The main research contents and academic achievements of the paper are as follows:(1)The research status of water-saving irrigation system at home and abroad is analyzed in this paper. By compared the advantages and disadvantages of IEEE802.11b, Bluetooth and ZigBee, ultimately the ZigBee wireless sensor network solution is determined.(2)The environmental parameters and communication requirements of farmlands are studied. According to the design principles of the system, the overall design of the irrigation system based on intelligent wireless sensor network is completed. The irrigation system consists of sensor nodes, field controller (gateway) nodes and the remote monitoring control center. The gateway controller node is the bridge of soil moisture collecting devices and the remote monitoring center is to ensure the successful completion of the exchange of information.(3)The hardware circuit of the gateway controller and wireless sensor nodes are designed in detail. The component selection is chosen according to the instrument accuracy, timeliness and cost requirements. To enhance the stability and scalability of the system, the modular design concept is adopted in the paper.(4)The software design consists of the upper and lower machine. The remote control interface is written by Visual Basic on PC. There are three parts in the lower software including ZigBee wireless communication modules, terminal sensor modules and gateway control modules. The farmland soil moisture information is collected and uploaded to the gateway controller node using the wireless communication module by sensor nodes. Controlling a solenoid valve, sending and receiving the data of temperature and humidity and commands are included in the software of gateway control nodes. The functions of the data collection, storage, analysis and automatic or manual control solenoid valve are achieved in the monitoring software.At last, more comprehensive on-line debugging to the system is carried out. The temperature and humidity data, the serial data output and ZigBee networking are tested respectively. Test results show that the smart irrigation system based on wireless sensor networks, designed in this paper, can meet the expected design requirements, the crop irrigation efficiency is improved, and water resource are saved greatly.