A conceptual framework of agroecological resource management system for climate-smart agriculture

Agroecological resource management system is defined as a network of components aiming to acquire, format and disseminate operational information related to precision farming. As precision farming is gaining popularity in the industrialized countries, now it is advancing toward the countries like India, China, Brazil and even some of the African countries. Features of several commercial and prototype sensor platforms designed and implemented for agricultural applications have been described, in many of the recent research publications, globally. This paper describes a conceptual framework for a low-cost agroecological resource management system suitable in Indian context. It presents an empirical investigation on the performance of this prototype system. This work highlights the advantages of multi-sink approach with the lightweight communication protocols for wireless sensor networks. This approach helps in handling the key issues like bottleneck problem and energy efficient data transmission to prolong the overall network lifetime with improved network performance. Validation of network and traffic performance is carried out using OMNeT++ simulation environment. The proposed model is based on IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocol stack with Chipcon CC2420 radio transceiver interface.