An application of message routing in intermittent networks to precision agriculture

Abstract

The widespread adoption of wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of Things in recent years has provided powerful technological tools for the advancement of precision agriculture, a concept in use since the end of the 20th century. The possibility of collecting data and information obtained from the deployment of a WSN that allows the evaluation of different actions and their impact on the production will change the productivity of agricultural and livestock raising activities, particularly in developing countries. In order to collect and process data in real time, properly running the underlying challenged network is critical, especially when the nodes operate on batteries, and their energy demand should be minimized so their active life is maximized. In this case, nodes may operate intermittently in order to extend their lifespan, so the graph representing the network changes over time. In this work, we address the problem of routing messages in intermittent networks arising from such applications. We propose an integer programming formulation for this problem and develop a heuristic based on the minimum-cost flow problem in networks. We evaluate their computational performances, and we apply the heuristic procedure to a case study coming from the application of WSN in a forced-drip irrigation lot. Based on our computational experiments, we argue that the use of this heuristic approach provides a simple and effective mechanism to assess different network configurations with agility.