Experimental validation of a wireless system for the irrigation management in smart farming applications

This work is aimed at presenting the water saving potentialities of a scalable smart irrigation system applied to precision agriculture. A fuzzy logic strategy is integrated in a distributed monitoring system based on the wireless sensor network technology. The optimal irrigation schedule is adaptively estimated according to the real-time measurement of the soil status and the weather conditions. The objective of the system is to optimize the water content in the soil to (i) maximize the health status of the plants, (ii) improve the quality of the products, and (iii) reduce the waste of water. The proposed system has been prototyped and experimentally validated in an apple orchard, close to the city of Trento, in the north of Italy. The performances of the proposed system are compared with those of a standard irrigation scheduler to point out the amount of saved water as well as the improved stability of the soil moisture level.