Clever irrigation management system using WSN

Duration: 3 - 6 months

Description: Recent studies in 'intelligent' irrigation systems have shown that the same agricultural yield can be obtained for half the amount of water used for irrigation. This offers enormous promise, especially for arid and semi-arid regions where water is is short supply. All existing solutions include sensor-fitted wired probes that are placed at appropriate depths to determine the moisture levels of the soil and thus decide whether irrigation is required. However, existing solutions have several drawbacks that ruel out their application in poor, semi-arid regions; the probe-based systems are expensive; the user interface is often difficult to handle for farmers with limited technical knowhow; etc.

This internship consists in the proposal of an alternative that corrects these shortcomings by being cost-effective, user-friendly, sensor-based, and wireless. A feasibility study carried out at the ISEP shows that it is indeed possible to develop such a system using off-the-shelf moisture sensors, leading to a significant cost reduction. It also becomes possible to network several sensors and thus manage irrigation systems over very large areas (entire villages, for example) since the new solution uses wireless technologies for sensor-controller and controller-irrigation communications.

The internship will confirm the feasibility study by a system-level modeling, followed by fabrication and test of a prototype.

Key words:  Irrigation systems; Wireless sensor networks.

Technical skills: Understanding of wireless sensor networks, wireless communications, Matlab.

Contact: Dr. Balwant Godara ( Cette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir. )