Distributed environmental monitoring design An ENS application is directed at agriculture control including comprehensive monitoring of soil moisture, solar radiation flux, atmospheric humidity, temperature and wind, and distributed plant imaging in order to monitor growth. In this problem, we consider that expert operators of an agricultural facility have set a requirement on monitoring a single linear transect consisting of sensor nodes spaced at 30m separation and extending over 3 km. A wide bandwidth data access port exists at one end of the transect and sensor data are to be transported to this point. Further, in this facility, the replacement of battery systems must be minimized and, due to location and average cloud cover, solar energy harvesting is not available.

(a) Select sensor systems with special regard to high accuracy and immunity to interfering effects. Include image sensor systems. Discuss packaging requirements for immunity to severe weather and imaging perspective for plants that will grow 1m tall.

(b) Consider a centralized system design in which unprocessed images and data are communicated via multihop links to the data access port where centralized processing is applied. Here, our sensor data record payload is 1 kbyte and our image data payload will be 100 kbytes. Sensor data records are to be communicated hourly. Image data payloads are to be communicated each 24 hours. We consider a node system having the computation and communication characteristics of processor platform 1 of Table 13.4 and radio platform1 of Table 13.5. Power dissipation for the processor platform is 0.05W. What are the battery energy requirements for each node in the linear transect? Assume that multihop communication only requires that the processor platform and radio system operation occurs for a period equal to the transmission time of the data packets involved.