Wireless Sensor Networks: State of the Art and Future Perspective

To reduce labour costs, the responsibilities of greenhouse production managers are ever increasing. This makes the decision-making process more complex and more information from the greenhouse work floor is needed. There is a tendency towards monitoring and managing crop production at plant level instead of monitoring the whole greenhouse, and as such there is an increasing amount of information coming from smaller individual sub-systems. To gather this information, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are beginning to play an important role. A few years ago, WSN entered the agricultural and horticultural domain. Advantages of WSN over wired sensors are: lower installation costs, flexibility and mobility. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art of WSN. The technical requirements of WSN in greenhouse crop production will be discussed. A WSN with 100 nodes to measure differences in spatial temperature and humidity is being used in a research project of Wageningen UR Greenhouse Horticulture. The preliminary results of this project are shown in this paper.