Development of a WSN integrated weather station node for an irrigation alert program under Tunisian conditions

Recent advances in sensor and wireless radio frequency (RF) technologies offer vast opportunities for development and application of sensor systems for agriculture. It is the concept of precision agriculture, where Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is playing an important part in the handling and managing of water resources for irrigation, in understanding the changes in the crops to assess the optimum point for harvesting, in estimating fertilizers requirements and to predict crop performance more accurately. The field micro-climate monitoring is important for crop water requirements determination. Traditional weather stations are expensive, on demand data collection and not flexible for new sensors addition or WSN integration. This paper aims at the design of a custom low-cost Weather Station hardware and software node (WS-node) for irrigation scheduling in developing countries context. These sensors data are transmitted to the DSS (Decision Support System) in a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) infrastructure, taking into account all particularities of such environments constraints. Cost factors, field conditions, farmer knowledge, devices availability are the most important ones.