Characterization of a low-cost and low-power environmental monitoring system

IoT is a revolutionary technology that represents the future of computing and communications. The paper focuses on the characterization of a Wireless Sensor Network used for smart agriculture, which is one of the new frontiers of IoT. Smart farming is the application of information and data technologies for optimizing complex farming systems. WSNs are widely used to measure agri-related information like temperature, humidity, solar radiation, presence of pollution and so on. In this paper the design of a wireless mesh network composed by low cost and low power system-on-a-chip is presented dealing with the frequently encountered issues of wireless networks. In particular, this work proposes a framework for the characterization of customized devices designed for monitoring networks: different types of test are performed in order to analyze the behavior of the components. The work focuses on the maximum coverage distance which is a critical parameter in agriculture field since the largeness of the involved area; it also deals with the thermal characterization to improve reliability performances and ADC calibration to ensure high accuracy of the acquired data. Moreover, the paper pays great attention on the power consumption of the sensor node, in fact the minimization of the current consumption of the nodes is a mandatory requirement to ensure low maintenance costs.