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WSN has been proved worth in almost every sector of work, such as health monitoring, environment sensing, traffic controlling, agricultural sectors, etc. In health monitoring, it is used for examining patients remotely. In the environment, sensors have been used for collecting data about air pollution, water pollution, water level, air humidity, etc. (Rashid & Chawla, 2015). It has been used for measuring various parameters in the greenhouse, such as light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, insect monitoring, etc.
Figure 1.
Sensor Nodes for Multi-Hop
WSN is a combination of hundreds of nodes if used at large scale. The above figure shows that some nodes are group together and connected to each other for the collection of data at a central station. Blue color represents nodes, whereas green color node represents gateway node. Data from sensor nodes are send to the gateway node by the process of routing. WSN comprises of hardware and software. Hardware work for WSN is almost neglect, as tiny sensors are hard to build. Work in this direction is a big challenge and is in process. On the other hand, software has huge potential despite some challenges such as power consumption. It consumes maximum power, which reduces the lifetime of sensor nodes in the network. Therefore, conservation of energy in WSN is a big research, which has been done, and still research in this area is in progress.
It is a self-powered computing unit, which consists of a unit processor, a transceiver and both analog and digital interfaces(Srivastava et al., 2013). Organizing into an ad-hoc network occurs automatically by sensors. This means that existing of infrastructure is not make essential. ZigBee is consider as an ad-hoc network. Main advantage is that real time data processing can be done and that too at a minimal cost (Holt et al., 2007). As they can organize themselves into a network, so deployment, expansion and maintenance have become easier (William et al., 2005). Online work is an additional feature provided by WSN for managing data of sensors. Several developers connect to the database through it (Lee et al., 2010). Data collected from this system is collaborated online among various users. Future work requires allowance of widgets, etc. APIs and interfaces have been use for online collaboration.
In the modern agriculture model, there is a tendency to promote the efficiency of available resources, the sustainability of the agricultural sector, the preservation of the environment and the safety and quality of products. Currently, 70% of drinking water consumption worldwide comes from the agricultural sector, pests, and diseases cause losses of more than 15% of production. In addition, inadequate applications of plant protection products, fertilizers or adverse weather conditions, not only cause losses in production but also in the quality of the products. For all these reasons, the professional agricultural sector must adapt to these requirements and its commitment to innovation is not only a tool to achieve them, but also to improve the productivity and quality of its products, as well as to differentiate itself from its competitors (Singh OV, et al., 2006). In this sense, the so-called Wireless Sensor Networks can be a tool to monitor, predict and optimize the management and resources of agricultural activity in real time.
Wireless Sensor Networks are made up of: