Peaknet LPR stack used in monitoring application

Sensingandcontrol has developed an application where EC-5 soil moisture probes from Decagon Devices can wirelessly transmit their measurements in open field agricultural applications to remote monitoring sites.

The Sensingandcontrol application is based on Greenpeak's Peaknet LPR communication stack, a wireless infrastructure network protocol developed on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 specifications in the worldwide certified 2.4 GHz band.

The Peaknet LPR solution reduces the energy consumption in the access points in large networks, so they no longer require power lines and can run on energy harvesting or have a very long battery life.

In this application, low power routers are mounted throughout the field to allow the formation of a large wireless mesh network.

The configuration of this extended low-power sensor network is facilitated by the self-forming and self-healing mesh technology that enables the data to find its way to the gateway and to the rest of the world in a fully automated manner.

By using the Greenpeak LPR stack, none of the routing nodes have to be defined as powered routers and consequently the network backbone no longer has to be powered.

This is achieved by using smart power-up/power-down and duty cycling synchronisation techniques.

By organising the network in this synchronised way the energy consumption for each router is reduced to a fraction of what it normally would be, allowing for an infrastructure that can run on energy harvesting without any maintenance or on batteries for a long time.

Every node is connected to three Decagon EC-5 soil moisture probes that gather information at 10cm, 20cm and 30cm depths below the surface to report the soil moisture within the rooting zone of the crops.

This allows the farmer to accurately monitor soil moisture levels, which are crucial to understand water uptake by the roots and to assure proper irrigation decisions.

The hourly measurements are stored in the nodes, sent to the coordinator of the wireless network and then the collected information is transferred via GPRS on a daily basis to a remote office.