Lifetime Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks for Vineyard Monitoring

In this paper, the expected lifetime of a wireless sensor network devoted to vineyard monitoring is considered. This network uses a technique called random or stochastic sampling for the continuous tracking of the air temperature across the vineyard, and a pure Aloha protocol without retransmissions for the delivery of data to the base station. The design is based on the fact that the reconstruction process at the application layer can tolerate certain jitter in the sampling process. This is completely acceptable because of the strong temporal and spatial correlations exhibited by the environmental conditions across the sensor field. In addition to simplicity, the proposed implementation provides excellent results in terms of network lifetime. The design can also be extended to broader contexts, such as precision agriculture and habitat monitoring in general