Typical soil health assessment requires intensive field sampling and laboratory analysis. Although this approach yields accurate results, it can be costly and labor intensive and not suitable for continuous tracking of soil properties. Advances in soil sensor and wireless technologies are poised to replace physical sampling and offline measurement with in-field monitoring. This article reports the development, deployment, and validation of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system for continuous monitoring of soil health. The end nodes of the proposed system, called soil health monitoring units (SHMUs), are solar powered and can be installed on a field for extended periods of time. Each SHMU transmits soil temperature, moisture, electrical conductivity, carbon dioxide (CO ₂ ), and geolocation data wirelessly using long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) radio technology. Data are received by a LoRaWAN gateway, which uploads it to a server for long-term storage and analysis. Users can view acquired data through a Web-based dashboard. The following significant experiments were carried out to validate the developed system: 1) a network consisting of eight SHMUs was deployed at an agricultural field site for several weeks and soil health metrics were analyzed using the soil health dashboard; 2) the flexibility of the system was demonstrated by the addition of an extra CO ₂ sensor allowing an additional variable directly linked to soil health to be recorded; 3) a wireless communication range of 3422 m was estimated at a transmission power of 10 dBm by deploying the developed system on a large field; 4) the average current consumption of a SHMU (including its associated sensors) was estimated to be 13 mA, at this rate, the onboard Li-ion battery is able to sustain a SHMU for several days; and 5) a 7 cm ×6.5 cm solar panel was able to fully charge the onboard battery in 14 days while supplying power to the SHMU.

With growing developments in the technology of cloud storage and the Internet of Things, smart systems have become the latest trend in major agricultural regions of the world. The Arequipa and Caylloma provinces of Peru are highly productive agricultural areas that could benefit from these technologies. This region has low precipitation, generally less than 100 mm per year. Electricity is not available in most of the agricultural fields, limiting the types of irrigation methods and technologies that can be supported. Currently, 20 ponds supplied by water runoff from the Andean glaciers are used for irrigating approximately 545 hectares of land in the Majes district (Caylloma province). In order to develop optimal techniques for water irrigation in Arequipa and improve the infrastructure, there is a need for development of a smart water irrigation system applicable to the existing conditions in the region. The current study proposes a pilot smart water irrigation framework comprised of a drip irrigation module, wireless communication module, and a sensor network for intelligently regulating water flow from the cloud. In this study, a TEROS 12 soil moisture sensor is connected to a Digi XBee wireless module for collecting measurements of volumetric water content, temperature, and electrical conductivity, which are sent through a secure IP gateway to the cloud. A user‐friendly web interface is available for end‐users to access and analyze real‐time data. The proposed framework is easily implementable, low‐cost, and is predicted to conserve water through optimization of irrigation cycles based on a set moisture threshold.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) for its low cost, easy deployment and affordable services are being used in different applications such as environmental monitoring, health, safety, among others. Recently, it has increased its use in localization and tracking problems. In a WSN, sensor node is associated with a coordinator node to form a Personal Area Network (PAN). In localization and tracking problems when sensor nodes are mobile there are problems when moving from one PAN to another, as they must execute a handover mechanism which is complicated by the limited computing capabilities that they have. In this paper, a WSN architecture for locating and tracking that eliminates the need for handover when a sensor node moves through the WSN is proposed. The proposed architecture considers two PAN conformations, one that is responsible for communicating the sensor nodes with nodes access point (AP) and the other forming a backbone network between the AP and the coordinator node. The results obtained after developing experiments in a real environment support the operation and benefits of the proposed architecture.