The word “smart” is quite commonly associated with different types of products of IoT sensors and its contemporary technology. The frequent progress in the contemporary technology includes convention and the progressive integration of microprocessor. This gives the smart sensors application to a wide range of applications. Smart sensors when associated with agriculture are known as smart agriculture. With the help of smart sensors, technology of internet of things has helped agriculture in facilitating its efficiency, which further helps in decreasing the impact of environment on the production of the crops and deprecate the expenses. This is done by a few methods like calculating the condition of the environment, which affects the production of the crops, keeping a check on the cattle health and indicating when some problem occurs. The author discussed about sensors, their nature and evolution, generations of smarts sensors, and how they became better with the course of time in terms of smart agriculture.
Top1. Introduction
A smart sensor is a type of device, which fetches data as input from the outside environment, processes that data, and gives the output in the human understandable and useful form. This process begins with the detection of a particular input and consequently built-in resources are adopted to operate functions, which are pre-defined. Not only it processes the input data, smart sensors also help in the automatic assembling of the data from physical environment, which is free from deceptive data, amidst the information, which is recorded in accurate manner (Kwaaitaal, 1993). The application area for smart sensors is quite wide like medical field, defence area and other various number of applications of science. Smart sensor also constitutes as an imperative and indispensable principle in other vital technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), the progressively contemporary platform with which anything plausible can be embedded with the help of a unique identifier i.e. UID (Amico et al., 2001; Chong et al., 2003).
The working of smart sensors is based on the idea of sensor nodes, which are substantially arrange either very close to the sensation or within it. Although it is not necessary to know the location of the sensor nodes in advance. Due to this factor, it becomes appropriate in unpredictable disaster relief process or distant terrains. Therefore, it states the idea that network protocols and algorithms related to sensors can process autonomous constructing and creating capabilities. This capability of sensor networks is surfaced only because of the cumulative application of sensor nodes (Schmalzel et al., 2005). A smart sensor node comprises of three vital and fundamental elements namely a memory core, a physical device that converts the energy from one form to another or physical transducer and a network interface. This transducer fetches or senses the data from physical environment and thus converts it in the form of electrical signal. This electrical signal is taken by an A/D converter as an input and converted into a digital based value, which can be further used by the processor. Here the processor, which is usually a type of a microcontroller, percolates the processing of the signals on the data fetched and forwards the output to the network in the form of the data. Hence, one can say that the processor, which is included in the network of smart sensors, can be considered as a type of a distributed parallel computer (Henry et al., 1993; Henry, 2001; Ho et al., 2005). Conventionally, sensor systems imbibe only single resource in which data is centrally processed. The advantage with this is that due to the local processing of the data at the node, the chosen data can be forwarded unrivalled to the network. With the help of this, the bandwidth which is necessary to sustain a single node is cut down adequately and hence larger number of nodes can endure the network (Kassal et al., 2018). Thus, we can say that sensor nodes are multifunctional, nominal and low-power consuming nodes, which are very peculiar in its size and can communicate sharply at short interval of distances. These minuscular, multifunctional sensor nodes can sense the data, process it and its components broadcast the data as well. Sensor nodes are equipped with a processor, which is on-board and rather than disseminating raw data, which is subject to the fusion, these nodes sustain its simple calculations by using processing competency. Through this, sensor nodes just transmit the necessary data that is moderately processed, for further communication instead of sending the entire loop of data. This collective effort of number of sensor nodes pushes the concept of sensor networks (Abbasi et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2010).