Wireless Sensor Network with Perpetual Motes for Terrestrial Snail Activity Monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are increasingly adopted in agriculture to monitor environmental variables to predict the presence of pests. Differently from these approaches, our work introduces a WSN to detect the presence of snails in the field. The network can be used to both trigger an alarm of early pest presence and to further elaborate statistical models with the addition of environmental data as temperature or humidity to predict snail presence. In this work we also design our own WSN simulator to account for real-life conditions as an uneven spacing of motes in the field or different currents generated by solar cells at the motes. This allows to achieve a more realistic network deployment in the field. Experimental tests are included in this paper, showing that our motes are perpetual in terms of energy consumption.

keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Agricultural pests, capacitive sensors, ZigBee, sensor applications