Wireless sensor network for crop-field animal intrusion detection and alert system.

Abstract

Uganda being an agricultural country needs more innovation in agricultural practices. Monitoring and control of farming environment could play an important role in farm production and management. Farm lands and plantations in Uganda and African countries are usually in remote places, however scale and in most cases not fenced. To monitor and control intrusion on such farmlands can be very expensive and very stressful. Therefore, farmers resort to building stick fences, rope fences, use scarecrows to provide required security measures and intruding animals have continued to destroy crops with all the farmers’ efforts. In addition, farmers especially around the game parks face security threats from wild animals intruding in their farms. The wireless sensor networks technology can provide the much-needed solution through sharing of real time information about farm intrusion. The designed WSNs system comprises of a set of sensor nodes, surveillance facilities and a base station that communicate with each other, gather information and make decisions about the intrusion. The system overcomes the limitation of building fences which can be very much stressful. It also has the advantages of motion detection, an alarm and alert system as a security measure. The alarm system (which can be replaced by any other system that scare a category of animals determined as regular intruders in an area) will be raised to scare the intruders away from the farm premises. The GSM module handles SMS with the farm owner indicating about the intrusion. It alerts the farmer that some human or animals are on the farm. The system has the weakness in the methods of scaring off of the intruders and I recommend that this system be integrated with other built methods of motion detection sensors and other methods of scaring off the animals could be integrated into the system to allow effective scaring off of the animals.