Wireless Sensor and Actuators Networks (WSANs) constitute one of the most challenging technologies with tremendous socio-economic impact for the next decade. Functionally and energy optimized hardware systems and development tools maybe is the most critical facet of this technology for the achievement of such prospects. Especially, in the area of agriculture, where the hostile operating environment comes to add to the general technological and technical issues, reliable and robust WSAN systems are mandatory. This paper focuses on the hardware design architectures of the WSANs for real-world agricultural applications. It presents the available alternatives in hardware design and identifies their difficulties and problems for real-life implementations. The paper introduces SensoTube, a new WSAN hardware architecture, which is proposed as a solution to the various existing design constraints of WSANs. The establishment of the proposed architecture is based, firstly on an abstraction approach in the functional requirements context, and secondly, on the standardization of the subsystems connectivity, in order to allow for an open, expandable, flexible, reconfigurable, energy optimized, reliable and robust hardware system. The SensoTube implementation reference model together with its encapsulation design and installation are analyzed and presented in details. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, certain use cases have been studied in order to demonstrate the benefits of migrating existing designs based on the available open-source hardware platforms to SensoTube architecture.
Keywords: ARM; Arduino; actuators; agriculture; energy management; expandable platforms; networks; open-source; sensors; wireless.