Power Reduction with Sleep/Wake on Redundant Data (SWORD) in a Wireless Sensor Network for Energy-Efficient Precision Agriculture  
[PERSON]  
1,2,*, [PERSON]  
1 Centre of Advanced Electronic & Communication Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, UKM Bangi, Selangor 43600, Malaysia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (R.N. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (A.M.J. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (M.I.) 2 Department of Computer Communication Engineering, Al-Rafidain University College, Filastin, Baghd 10064, Iraq 2  
3 Department of Medical Instrumentation Techniques Engineering, Electrical Engineering Technical College, Middle Technical University, Baghdad, Iraq; [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
4 Department of Statistic, Al-Rafidain University College, Filastin, Baghdad 10064, Iraq; [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
5 Correspondence: [EMAIL_ADDRESS]; Tel. : +60-105-188-509  
considered. WSNs cannot be deployed easily because they represent the security and economy of countries. The potential applications of WSNs in the civilian domain include agricultural [1], industrial [2], healthcare [3], natural disaster [4], and monitoring uses. In recent years, WSNs have been extensively used in various monitoring applications for PA. WSN technology presents many advantages, such as low cost, scalability, reliability, accuracy, flexibility, low power requirement, and easy deployment, which enable its use in diverse applications [5; 6; 7]. PA is a control scheme that utilizes information technology to improve crop quality and production. It is an advanced technology for enhancing crop production in different types of farm. PA is widely adopted to minimize diseases and pests, and consequently, reduce the use of pesticides, thereby leading to efficient and environmentally acceptable agriculture [7; 8]. Having a similar routine and yield regardless of locations, conditions, and labor intensity can be avoided through PA control. The most important applications of PA in agriculture are in the monitoring of air temperature, relative humidity, soil moisture, and vapor pressure deficit to reduce production risks prior to the cultivation of a specific crop [9; 10]. The advancement of WSNs has produced new research approaches in agriculture. Furthermore, the development of microelectromechanical technologies has resulted in the manufacture of small and low-cost sensors. The extensive use of microcontrollers and microprocessors, which involve small, self-modifiable sensor nodes, low-cost tools, and scalability, indicates that WSNs can be used in agriculture computerization [5]. However, a number of limitations and challenges must be addressed before WSNs can be utilized to monitor diverse agricultural environments. The primary limitations and challenges in current PA applications that rely on WSNs have been highlighted. Moreover, proposals on how to address them have been provided. The first challenge is extending the battery life and reducing the power consumption of sensor nodes. Reducing the power consumption of radio frequency (RF) modules considerably minimizes the power consumption of sensor nodes because RF modules use considerable power [11]. The power consumption problem can be resolved by adopting a specific power reduction technique or algorithm. An energy-harvesting technique can also be combined with the selected power reduction technique. The second challenge is communication distance. WSNs suffer from the effects of harsh ecological environments due to their wide communication area in agricultural fields [12]. Consequently, data packets are lost in the transmitting and receiving processes [6; 13]. In agricultural applications, however, when distance increases between nodes in the network due to the large width of agriculture fields, the communication range can be lengthened by considering different network topologies, such as mesh networks. Mobile router nodes, such as unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, can also be utilized. Drones can be used to pass data from sensor nodes to the coordinator node via a multihop process.