Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks in Precision Agriculture: Recent Trends and Future Directions

Agricultural production and water has critical importance for socio-economic development of the societies. Unfortunately, the underground water level is slowly falling down and forests are being cut which reduces the rainfall as well. Technological advances on sensor technology and wireless communication are leading to the appearance of wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) in a variety of commercial, industrial and military applications. There is no doubt merging wireless sensor technology into agricultural facilities will make farming activities much easier. In this paper, we look at the role of WSANs in agricultural production. We also investigate the communication architecture of WSAN based large scale irrigation management system and explain the key issues that are faced in the system design. Thanks to the easy installation and maintenance of WSANs, lots of water can be saved by giving timely feedback from field to improve the agricultural irrigation efficiency. This kind of solution can greatly help farmers to monitor the amount of water applied to a fiel

QoS Challenges and Opportunities in Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks

A wireless sensor/actuator network (WSAN) is a group of sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed and interconnected by wireless networks. Sensors gather information about the state of physical world. Actuators react to this information by performing appropriate actions. WSANs thus enable cyber systems to monitor and manipulate the behavior of the physical world. WSANs are growing at a tremendous pace, just like the exploding evolution of Internet. Supporting quality of service (QoS) will be of critical importance for pervasive WSANs that serve as the network infrastructure of diverse applications. To spark new research and development interests in this field, this paper examines and discusses the requirements, critical challenges, and open research issues on QoS management in WSANs. A brief overview of recent progress is given.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; revie

A Survey of Applying Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks to Enhance Context-Awareness in Environmental Management Systems

Sensor mesh networking is set to be one of the key tools for the future of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) due to new emerging technologies in Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (AWSNs). AWSNs symbolize the new generation of sensor networks with many promising advantages applicable to most networked environments. Unfortunately, however, these practical technologies have some technical problems and, as a consequence, this fascinating field has created novel and interesting challenges, which in turn, have inspired many ongoing research projects and more are likely to follow. Almost certainly, there will be notable improvements in the management of control/actuator networks as a consequence of enhancing the sensitivity capabilities of systems. With an emphasis on Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks (AWSANs) this study presents a systematic analysis of the different existing techniques to improve such systems. It also discusses, analyzes and summarizes the advantages these technologies offer in certain applications and presents a generic solution, in the form of a case study, for an AmI system to enhance the overall environmental management of a campus based on a hierarchical network using an AWSAN

Computing and communications for the software-defined metamaterial paradigm: a context analysis

Metamaterials are artificial structures that have recently enabled the realization of novel electromagnetic components with engineered and even unnatural functionalities. Existing metamaterials are specifically designed for a single application working under preset conditions (e.g., electromagnetic cloaking for a fixed angle of incidence) and cannot be reused. Software-defined metamaterials (SDMs) are a much sought-after paradigm shift, exhibiting electromagnetic properties that can be reconfigured at runtime using a set of software primitives. To enable this new technology, SDMs require the integration of a network of controllers within the structure of the metamaterial, where each controller interacts locally and communicates globally to obtain the programmed behavior. The design approach for such controllers and the interconnection network, however, remains unclear due to the unique combination of constraints and requirements of the scenario. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to provide a context analysis from the computation and communication perspectives. Then, analogies are drawn between the SDM scenario and other applications both at the micro and nano scales, identifying possible candidates for the implementation of the controllers and the intra-SDM network. Finally, the main challenges of SDMs related to computing and communications are outlined.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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Distributed Collaborative Processing under Communication Delay over Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

In wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), the sensor nodes are involved in gathering information about the physical phenomenon, while the actuator nodes take decisions and then perform appropriate actions upon the environment. The collaborative operation of sensor and actuator nodes brings significant advantages over WSNs, including improved accuracy and timely actions upon the sensed phenomena. However, unreliable wireless communication and finding a proper control strategy cause challenges in designing such network control system. In order to accomplish effective sensing and acting tasks, efficient coordination mechanisms among different nodes are required. In this paper, the coordination and communication problems in WSANs are studied. First, we formulate the mathematical models for the WSANs system. Then, a predictor-controller algorithm based on distributed estimation is adopted to mitigate the effects of network-induced delay. Finally, we apply a collaborative processing mechanism to meet the desired system requirements and improve the overall control performance. This approach will group the sensor and actuator nodes to work in parallel so as to reduce the computation complexity and enhance the system reacting time. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method