Sensors 2016, 16(5), 644; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16050644
A Reliable Wireless Control System for Tomato Hydroponics
Hirofumi Ibayashi 1,*
, Yukimasa Kaneda 2, Jungo Imahara 3, Naoki Oishi 3, Masahiro Kuroda 4 and Hiroshi Mineno 1,5,*
1
Graduate School of Informatics, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 432-8011, Japan
2
Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 432-8011, Japan
3
Shizuoka Prefectural Research Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, 678-1 Tomioka, Iwata, Shizuoka 438-0803, Japan
4
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 4-2-1 Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei 184-8795, Japan
5
JST, PRESTO, 4-1-8 Honcho, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Simon X. Yang
Received: 29 February 2016 / Revised: 27 April 2016 / Accepted: 30 April 2016 / Published: 5 May 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Agriculture)
Abstract
Agricultural systems using advanced information and communication (ICT) technology can produce high-quality crops in a stable environment while decreasing the need for manual labor. The system collects a wide variety of environmental data and provides the precise cultivation control needed to produce high value-added crops; however, there are the problems of packet transmission errors in wireless sensor networks or system failure due to having the equipment in a hot and humid environment. In this paper, we propose a reliable wireless control system for hydroponic tomato cultivation using the 400 MHz wireless band and the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The 400 MHz band, which is lower than the 2.4 GHz band, has good obstacle diffraction, and zero-data-loss communication is realized using the guaranteed time-slot method supported by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In addition, this system has fault tolerance and a self-healing function to recover from faults such as packet transmission failures due to deterioration of the wireless communication quality. In our basic experiments, the 400 MHz band wireless communication was not affected by the plants’ growth, and the packet error rate was less than that of the 2.4 GHz band. In summary, we achieved a real-time hydroponic liquid supply control with no data loss by applying a 400 MHz band WSN to hydroponic tomato cultivation. View Full-TextKeywords:
sensor network; actuator control; highly reliable wireless communication; agricultural system; 400 MHz band
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Ibayashi, H.; Kaneda, Y.; Imahara, J.; Oishi, N.; Kuroda, M.; Mineno, H. A Reliable Wireless Control System for Tomato Hydroponics. Sensors 2016, 16, 644.
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