Enhancing Energy Saving in Smart Farming through Aggregation and Partition Aware IoT Routing Protocol

Internet of things (IoT) for precision agriculture or Smart Farming (SF) is an emerging area of application. It consists essentially of deploying wireless networks of IP-enabled sensor nodes in a partitioned farmland area. When the surface, diversity, and complexity of the farm increases, the number of sensing nodes increases, generating heavy exchange of data and messages, and thus leading to network congestion, radio interference, and high energy consumption. In this work, we propose a novel routing algorithm extending the well known IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL). It is referred to as the Partition Aware-RPL (PA-RPL). that improves the standard IoT routing algorithm (i.e., RPL). In contrast to RPL, the proposed technique builds a routing topology enabling efficient in-network data aggregation, hence dramatically reducing data traffic through the network. Performance analysis of a typical/realistic precision agriculture case, considering the potato pest prevention from the well-known late blight disease, shows that PA-RPL improves energy saving up to 40 % , compared to standard RPL.