Abstract
Applications of low cost wireless sensor nodes in
precision agriculture are being gradually adopted by commercial
agricultural cooperatives as part of the continuing
industrialisation of commercial agriculture. Current applications
require extensive testing and experimentation to ensure reliable
message transmission, because the transmitted wireless signal is
scattered by the surrounding foliage. Network topology and node
density is not optimized. In this paper, experiments to determine
the effect of surrounding vegetation on the wireless signal in
terms of link reliability, and signal strength for three different
types of agricultural crops, namely, ground foliage, medium
height and density vegetation, and very dense types of foliage is
analyzed and discussed. The objective is to demonstrate that
current radio propagation foliage loss models are not optimised
for use in precision agriculture.