A status quo of WSN systems for agriculture

Wireless Sensor Networks have revolutionized mobile Computing in the past decade or so. A myriad of systems have been designed and developed for various applications, most commonly, environmental monitoring, water quality monitoring, structural monitoring etc. One particular domain where there is a dearth of sensor networks implementation is agriculture. The advantages of sensor networks have not been leveraged for agriculture, particularly in the Indian agriculture scenario. Indian agriculturists or farmers have been using primitive methods such as use of bullock karts for plowing, use of Persian water wheel to collect water for irrigation, manual sowing, Harvesting of crops manually, etc. With India's major economy earnings coming from agricultural products, it is imperative to use technology to improve productivity and consequently the economic growth of the country. This work presents a survey of wireless sensor network systems deployed for the agricultural domain. We clearly lay out the working methodologies and the drawbacks of existing systems, build upon them and finally propose our idea of a wireless sensor network for estimating crop yield that would help the farmer in making a right decision in choosing the right kind of crop.