Journal of Agronomy and Field Innovations

Background: Soil salinization is the most widespread environmental issue across the globe that reduces the yield of crops in farming lands. Traditional methods of measuring soil salinity involve selecting a soil sample and conducting an electrical conductivity measurement in the laboratory. Such processes are tedious and do not cover the spatial and temporal variation caused by cultivation, transpiration, and precipitation.
Objective: This paper proposes the method for designing the architecture of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with cheap soil sensing node components and using LoRa technology, edge computing, and cloud computing in the operation of a real-time soil salinity measurement.
Methods: New sensor networks were developed that collect soil electrical conductivity, soil moisture, soil temperature, pH, air temperature, and humidity data from a field of 2.4 hectares in size. The data transmission had to occur through LoRaWAN towards a gateway, where the data was processed for sending it further to the cloud storage for visualization purposes. The measurements of the collected data were evaluated in terms of accuracy and RMSE; the packet delivery, delays, and energy consumption were also evaluated.
Result: According to the obtained results, the proposed technique had a mean salinity estimate accuracy of 96.2%. The RMSE of the suggested approach was found to be lower than the RMSE from laboratory EC recordings at 0.18 dS/m, and the packet delivery ratio was established to be 98.4%, while the average end-to-end latency is normal for 1.8 seconds, not to mention the battery lifetime that amounts to 14 months with the sampling period of 15 minutes. Thus, the obtained results proof that the proposed approach is much superior to conventional sampling method in time resolution, as well as to all existing wireless sensor networks.
Conclusion: Consequently, the proposed system is an energy-efficient, effective, and reliable wireless sensor network for real-time monitoring of salinity level in the soil.