Wireless Sensor Solutions Demystify Precision Agriculture San Diego, CA-- September 17, 2008 -- Facing a water shortage crisis and the demands of a global economy, farmers are turning to wireless sensing solutions to save labor costs, increase yields, improve quality, and conserve water, according to a recent report by ON World. The emergence of standards based short range radios, advanced network protocols, and the availability of low cost backhaul technologies, have made wireless sensor systems an affordable competitive advantage for farmers/growers. Despite this large market opportunity, there are only a handful of wireless crop monitoring providers today with end-to-end offerings. Some vendors such as Crossbow, Grape Networks, and Ranch Systems use unlicensed radios and mesh network systems that collect sensor data from multiple points to a low cost backhaul system. Others include Adcon, the current market leader with a long range telemetry infrastructure and SCADA software, and PureSense, a NASA spinoff that provides a hosted software service for crop monitoring and water management. Power management is a key consideration that affects the performance and lifetime of a wireless sensor node, especially for mesh networks. IEEE802.15.4 is the most commonly used radio for short range wireless sensing that is used in both star and mesh topologies for crop monitoring. ON World's wsnSimulator™ software tool demonstrates that several proprietary mesh network protocols such as Xmesh, TSMP, and Sampled Listening provide the best performance in sleep mode, an important consideration for outdoor wireless devices that require long battery lives. For more information, go to: http://onworld.com/smartcrops/ About ON World: Media Contact: |