Smart Dust Technology for Monitoring and Control Systems in Smart Agriculture and Crop Surveillance Systems

Developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have brought a huge impact on the social and economic development of the world. In India, most of the rural community depends on farming for their lives. Modern farming practice is necessary to satisfy the food grain requirements of the growing population. The ICT sector plays a vital role in imparting sustainable knowledge to farmers by offering a wide range of solutions to some of the challenges with an objective of improving crop productivity. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the enabling technologies and is successfully used for efficient and profitable precision agriculture.
A sensor network is a highly distributed, self-organized system consisting of a set of battery-operated small sensor nodes. It is used to monitor the various location-specific parameters related to soil, crop, and climate. The sensor nodes are mostly deployed in open and harsh environments and should operate in an unmanned manner for an expected duration. These nodes rely on battery power for their functioning, hence energy efficiency is of paramount interest in these resource constraint networks. It is identified that the grid topology-based sensor network is well suited for agriculture applications. The various field-specific parameters collected by the sensor networks are reported to a base station (sink) for further processing.
The data stored in the sink are used for the mission of soil moisture forecasting and sugarcane yield classification problems. Sugarcane is one of the profitable and indigenous crops cultivated in India. Being a long-term irrigated crop, it does not need a specific soil type but needs a high water requirement. Therefore, adequate soil moisture should be available throughout the growing period, as the cane growth is directly proportional to the water transpired. This makes the work discussed in this chapter to give focus to development of smart agriculture.