2009 International Conference on Networks Security, Wireless Communications and Trusted Computing

A wireless design of low-cost irrigation system using ZigBee technology

Yiming Zhou, Xianglong Yang, Liren Wang, Yibin Ying School of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China e-mail: benton.zym@tom.com; xlyang@zju.edu.cn; wanglr@zucc.edu.cn; ybying@zju.edu.cn
AbstractAt present, labor-saving and water-saving technology is a key issue in irrigation. A wireless solution for intelligent field irrigation system dedicated to Jew's-ear planting in Lishui, Zhejiang, China, based on ZigBee technology was proposed in this paper. Instead of conventional wired connection, the wireless design made the system easy installation and maintenance. The hardware architecture and software algorithm of wireless sensor/actuator node and portable controller, acting as the end device and coordinator in ZigBee wireless sensor network respectively, were elaborated in detail. The performance of the whole system was evaluated in the end. The long-time smooth and proper running of the system in the field proved its high reliability and practicability. As an explorative application of wireless sensor network in irrigation management, this paper offered a methodology to establish large-scale remote intelligent irrigation system. Keywords- Irrigation; Wireless Sensor Network; ZigBee; Lowcost

application [7]. Although power shortages were improved in the wireless distributed system cost was a little high. Besides, the monitoring and control system was not a network self-forming and self-healing.

and radio range system [9], the in-field wireless real WSN with

As an example of wireless irrigation system, this paper developed a design dedicated to Jews ear planting in Lishui region, Zhejiang province in China using ZigBee technology featuring low power, low-cost and easy employment. II. BACKGROUND

I.

INTRODUCTION

People now are working actively at intelligent irrigation systems because their advantages of labor-saving and watersaving [1-3]. Wireless technology, known for its easy installation and maintenance, is thought preponderant to develop automatic irrigation network and becoming a hot research. Shock et al. (1999) used radio transmission for soil moisture data from data loggers to a central computer logging site [4]. Valente et al. (2007) explored a grid of self-powered multi-functional probes (MFPz) for small-scale measurements of different soil properties, as part of a wireless sensor network (WSN) [5]. Zhao et al. (2007) designed an irrigation system for city greenbelt adopting moisture sensor, wireless communication and RS-485 bus to achieve remote control and distributed control [6]. Cao et al. (2005) reported a data acquisition and irrigation control system using nRF903 single chip RF transceiver [7]. A wireless automatic control system for well irrigation was developed by Qi et al. (2005) to realize reasonable utilization of ground water [8]. Kim et al. (2008) presented an integrated distributed wireless sensor network that utilizes Bluetooth technology for sensor-based variable rate irrigation systems [9]. However, some researchers didnt have fully integrated the system [4,5,10] and the system [6], actually was not totally configured by wireless module because RS485 bus was also used. Cao et al. (2005) didnt mention the power design and management of wireless sensor which is important in wireless
978-0-7695-3610-1/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/NSWCTC.2009.231 572

With the rapid development of agriculture in China, many automatic technologies have been introduced into agricultural productions in the research institutions and national agricultural parks. However, the common farmers, occupying 64 percent of the population, are still using traditional tools because of their low education level and the high cost of advanced instruments. Lishui, which is generally accepted as the place where was originated the technology of mushroom in the world, is the biggest producing area of the edible fungus in China, and the output of the edible fungus accounts for about 45 percent in the country. Jews ear is a very popular variety of the edible fungus. The key factor affecting Jews ear planting lies in irrigation which up to now mainly depends on manual work and thus, with such low efficiency, badly restricts the edible fungus production. So, there are now pressing needs for intelligent irrigation system with low-cost, easy operation and high reliability. III. METHOD

We explored an economical automatic irrigation system based on wireless sensor network for Jews ear planting. While WSN dispenses with the substantial costs of wiring, the ZigBee WSN technologies are most suitable for agricultural application comparing with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which work at similar frequencies as ZigBee [11]. We have successfully applied the ZigBee wireless technology to greenhouse management in our previous researches [11-12]. Now we are focusing on the study of its application to intelligent irrigation. A. Application Environment The farmers plots for planting Jews ear usually spread 2 from 2000 m2 to 7000 m . In such a planting and irrigation section, only one sensor node is needed to measure the air temperature and humidity. However, numbers of wireless

actuator nodes are required to control the pumps and electromagnetic valves according to the acreage of irrigation section. They act the same role as end devices in wireless sensor network. B. Solution Overview A practical system layout of in-field WSN for one irrigation section is illustrated in Fig. 1.

designed on a wireless node to control the pump and electromagnetic valves (see Fig. 2(c)). Fig. 2 (d) showed the photo of the portable controller, which contained a LCD and four buttons for displaying, settings and manual operations. The controller was mainly powered by mains power, and allowed to be powered by onboard batteries as well for emergent use. D. Nodes Software System The ZigBee specifications define three networking topologies suitable for various applications. Star networks are common and provide for very long battery life operation. Mesh, or peer-to-peer, networks enable high levels of reliability and scalability by providing more than one path through the network. Tree networks combine the benefits of both for high levels of reliability and support for batterypowered nodes. Our irrigation system was based on the star network. The software algorithms of the three kinds of nodes are shown in Fig. 3. Once the coordinator (portable controller) started, it created its personal area network (PAN) and allowed the end devices (sensor actuator nodes) to join the network. After the wireless sensor network formed, it received the sensor data and displayed them on the LCD. Irrigation commands could be sent to wireless actuator node determined by the expert strategies. Manual operation was also accessible to the users by pressing the buttons. The application puts the nodes into doze mode whenever possible to save energy.
Start Initialization Create PAN Join Request End Devices Connect Request Allow Connect? Y Assign Network Address Receive Sensor Data Data Process Need Irrigate? N Display on LCD Y Send Command N Connect Success? Y Read Sensors Sleep Receive Command? Y Implement N N Join Request Connect Success? Start Destination PAN Found? Start Destination PAN Found?

Figure 1. Conceptual system layout of wireless sensor network for field irrigation.

The system consists of a portable controller, a wireless sensor node, a weather station and several wireless actuators. The sensor node collects the temperature and air humidity parameters in its section, whereas the nearby weather station monitors the meteorological information indicating if it rains. All the sensory data are wirelessly sent to the portable controller. The in-field actuator nodes are used to control the pump and electromagnetic valves when receive the control commands wirelessly transmitted from the portable controller. Both sensor node and actuator node serve as end devices in the wireless network, composing the WSN together with the portable controller which acts as the coordinator in ZigBee protocol to build and maintain the wireless sensor network and meanwhile manage the irrigation system. Because the ZigBee WSN is self-forming and self-healing, the ad-hoc irrigation system allows user to add or decrease the number of end devices (sensor nodes and actuator nodes) to meet the largescale application. If routers are applied, the mesh irrigation network connecting several sections can be configured for remote intelligent irrigating. Expert irrigation strategies can be applied by connecting the portable controller to computer through RS232 if needed. C. Hardware Design A single chip JN5121 (JENNIC Ltd, UK) was selected as the microcontroller for all the nodes because of its high integration and low cost shown in Fig. 2(a). SMA-connector antenna was connected to the built-in transceiver through a balun. The wireless sensor node mainly contained a relative humidity and temperature multi-sensor SHT1x (SENSIRION, Switzerland) to monitor the field environment (see Fig. 2(b)) and was powered by batteries. Similar to the sensor node, wireless actuator node connected the actuator driving circuits to the JN5121 module. In our system, six output channels were

Send data Sleep

(b)

(c)

(a)
Figure 3. Program algorithm flowchart of portable controller (a), wireless sensor node (b) and wireless actuator node (c)

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IV.

PERFORMANCES

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A. Node Power Consumption The power consumption determines the service life of those battery-powered nodes working in the field. Since the portable controller in our system can be powered by external power supply and the wireless actuator node are mostly in sleep mode, so only the power consumption of the sensor node was discussed below [11], including current consumption of JN5121 [13] and the power consumption of sensors on board. The sensor node in the enabled wireless network continuously performed the same actions as follow according to Fig. 3(b). We set the circulation time of the sensor node for 10 seconds in our system. The electrical charge value of each phase and the sensor on board are listed in table 1. The average current drawn by this application can be calculated by adding the electrical charge consumed during each phase and dividing by the total cycle time (10 seconds), that is approximately 68.7A. The node should therefore be capable for about 15 months when powered by two 750mAh batteries (AAA, 1.5v). That means people do not need to replace the batteries for the sensor node in 2 years.
TABLE I. THE ELECTRICAL CHARGE VALUE CONSUMED DURING EACH
PHASE

80

PER(%)

60

40

20

0 75 125 175 225 275 325 375 425

Distance(m)

Figure 4. The packet error rate in different distance

C. System Cost The irrigation system is developed with module design which helped to reduce the cost. The wireless sensor node and actuator node was about 30 US dollars and the portable controller was around $100. The total cost to build up a wireless field irrigation system depended on the planting area, and for a case of 5000m2, it was approximately $400 in terms of hardware cost. V. CONCLUSION Efficient irrigation management is a major concern in many planting systems. In this study, we presented a wireless solution of in-field irrigation system based on ZigBee technology which allowed farmers to maximize their productivity while saving labour force. This paper showed in details of the design of the hardware architecture, the software algorithm applied for the field irrigating management. The performance of the whole system proved its high reliability. The practicability and low-cost made the system easily accepted by the common users in China. Potential applications of this system can be extended to environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and facility automation by little modifications. People can also link several such star irrigation networks through adding wireless routers to achieve large-scale remote irrigation application. REFERENCES
[1] D. Selvath, S. Salivahanan, G. Indumathi, K.R. Vijay Kumar, S. Thamaraiselvi, Fuzzy logic based intelligent control for irrigation system. IETE Technical Review (Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, India), vol. 20, May/June 2003, pp.199203. Y. Liu, Z.H. Ren, D.M. Li, X.K. Tian, Z.N. Lu, The research of precision irrigation decision support system based on genetic algorithm. Proc. 2006 Int. Conf. Machine Learning and Cybernetics(ICMLC 06), Aug. 2006, pp. 3123-3127, doi: 10.1109/ICMLC.2006.258403. S. Khan, M.M. Hafeez, S. Rana, S. Mushtaq, Enhancing water productivity at the irrigation system level: A geospatial hydrology application in the Yellow River Basin, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 72, June 2008, pp.1046-1063, doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2007.11.011. C. C. Shock, R. J. David, C. A. Shock, C. A. Kimberling, Innovative, automatic, low-cost reading of Watermark soil moisture sensors, Proceedings of the International Irrigation Show, Nov. 1999, pp.147 152. A. Valente, R. Morais, C. Serodio, P. Mestre, S. Pinto, M. Cabral, A ZigBee Sensor Element for Distributed Monitoring of Soil Parameters in

Phase Wake from sleep Read sensors Perform CCA Transmit data Sleep Sensor on Board Total 551.7 45 18.56 30.976 34.762 5.749

Charge (C)

686.747

B. Communication Range According to the growing environment of Jews ear, we evaluated the communication range through packet error rate (PER) testing using portable controller and wireless sensor node as the master module and slave module respectively. The test was carried out in the open air and 1m above the ground without barrier between the devices. The sensor node sent 10000 frames to portable controller via the RF link in different distance and the PER was checked for the valid communication range which turned to be up to 400 meters. The test result was shown in Fig. 4.

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

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[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

Environmental Monitoring, 2007 IEEE SENSORS, Oct. 2007, pp.135138. Y.D. Zhao, C.X. Bai, B. Zhao, An Automatic Control System of Precision Irrigation for City Greenbelt, Proc. 2nd IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications(ICIEA 07), May 2007, pp. 2013 2017, doi:10.1109/ICIEA.2007.4318763. C.M. Cao, P. Xia, Z.Q. Zhu, Application of wireless data transmission to the automatic control of water saving irrigation, Transactions of The Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering, vol. 21, April 2007, pp.127-130(in Chinese). X.B. Qi, S.G. Gao, H.F. Zhao, X.Y. Fan, Wireless Automatic Control System for Well Irrigation Area in North China, Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, vol. 36, Feb. 2005, pp.232-237(in Chinese). Y. Kim, R.G. Evans, W.M. Iversen, Remote sensing and control of an irrigation system using a distributed wireless sensor network, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, vol. 57, July 2008, pp. 1379-1387.
: for sensor node : for actuator node : for portable controller ROM RAM

[10] G. Vellidis, M. Tucker, C. Perry, C. Bednarz, A real-time wireless smart sensor array for scheduling irrigation, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, vol. 61, April 2008, pp.44-50, doi: 10.1016/j.compag.2007.05.009. [11] Q. Zhang, X.L.Yang, , Y.M. Zhou, L.R. Wang, X.S. Guo, A Wireless Solution for Greenhouse Monitoring and Control System Based on ZigBee Technology, Journal of Zhejiang University-Science A, vol. 8, Oct. 2007, pp. 1584-1587, doi: 10.1631/jzus.2007.A1584. [12] Y.M. Zhou, X.L.Yang, X.S. Guo, M.G. Zhou, L.R. Wang, A Design of Greenhouse Monitoring and Control System Based on ZigBee Sensor Network, Proc. International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing(WICOM 07), Sep. 2007, pp.25632567, doi: 10.1109/WICOM.2007.638. [13] Jennic Ltd., Reference Manual: JN-AN-1001-Power-Estimation1v3.pdf, Http:// www.jennic.com.

External Flash Memory

Transceiver

Sensors Actuators

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GPIO

MCU JN5121
GPIO GPIO

Balun

RS232

External Power/ Batteries

LCD

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Figure 2. Hardware architecture for the nodes (a), wireless sensor node (b), wireless actuator node (c), the portable controller (d).

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