Optimal Deployment of WSN Nodes for Crop Monitoring Based on Geostatistical Interpolations

Edgar Andres Gutierrez; Ivan Fernando Mondragon; Julian D Colorado; Diego Mendez Ch

doi:10.3390/plants11131636

Optimal Deployment of WSN Nodes for Crop Monitoring Based on Geostatistical Interpolations

Plants (Basel). 2022 Jun 21;11(13):1636. doi: 10.3390/plants11131636.

Authors

Edgar Andres Gutierrez^{1

2}, Ivan Fernando Mondragon¹, Julian D Colorado¹, Diego Mendez Ch¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota 110231, Colombia.
² School of Electronics Engineering, Universidad Santo Tomás Colombia, Bogota 150001, Colombia.

Abstract

This paper proposes an integrated method for the estimation of soil moisture in potato crops that uses a low-cost wireless sensor network (WSN). Soil moisture estimation maps were created by applying the Kriging technique over a WSN composed of 11×11 nodes. Our goal is to estimate the soil moisture of the crop with a small-scale WSN. Using a perfect mesh approach on a potato crop, experimental results demonstrated that 25 WSN nodes were optimal and sufficient for soil moisture characterization, achieving estimations errors <2%. We provide a strategy to select the number of nodes to use in a WSN, to characterize the moisture behavior for spatio-temporal analysis of soil moisture in the crop. Finally, the implementation cost of this strategy is shown, considering the number of nodes and the corresponding margin of error.

Keywords: Kriging interpolation; WSN; potato crops; remote sensing; soil moisture.

Grants and funding

This work was partly funded by the OMICAS program: “Optimización Multiescala In-silico de Cultivos Agrícolas Sostenibles (Infraestructura y validación en Arroz y Caña de Azúcar),” anchored at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali and funded within the Colombian Scientific Ecosystem by The World Bank, the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the Colombian Ministry of Education, the Colombian Ministry of Industry and Tourism and ICETEX, under grant ID: FP44842-217-2018 and OMICAS Award ID: 792-61187. Additionally Colciencias-Colfuturo Boyaca doctoral study grant region number 779 was given to Edgar Gutierrez.