The advent of Internet of Things has propelled the agricultural domain through the integration of sensory devices, capable of monitoring and wirelessly propagating information to producers; thus, they employ Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). These WSNs allow real time monitoring, enabling intelligent decision-making to maximize yields and minimize cost. Designing and deploying a WSN is a challenging and multivariate task, dependent on the considered environment. For example, a need for network synchronization arises in such networks to correlate acquired measurements. This work focuses on the design and installation of a WSN that is capable of facilitating the sensing aspects of smart and precision agriculture applications. A system is designed and implemented to address specific design requirements that are brought about by the considered environment. A simple synchronization scheme is described to provide time-correlated measurements using the sink node’s clock as reference. The proposed system was installed on an olive grove to assess its effectiveness in providing a low-cost system, capable of acquiring synchronized measurements. The obtained results indicate the system’s overall effectiveness, revealing a small but expected difference in the acquired measurements’ time correlation, caused mostly by serial transmission delays, while yielding a plethora of relevant environmental conditions.

Technological evolution and in particular the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has paved the way for material prosperity and a better standard of living. A critical factor in the effectiveness of emerging IoT applications, which heavily rely on sensor information flow, is the development of a functional and efficient Wireless Sensor Network. Additionally, the levels of automation are conducive to usability and time efficiency by reducing the need for human intervention, as well as increasing the rate at which experiments can be carried out. In current work, an already installed infrastructure on the Ionian University campus is considered and enhanced, with the goal of elevating accessibility and user-friendliness, by designing a web platform. The presented platform enables the remote development, execution and monitoring of simple but necessary network-based algorithms using a custom language, without requiring code to be uploaded to remote nodes. As a proof of concept, three information dissemination algorithms are implemented and provided as example templates for users, promoting simultaneously ease of use.

The construction of Connected Dominating Sets (CDS) in order to provide virtual backbones over low-cost wireless networks and facilitate the operation of intelligent services in smart tourism environments is a challenging task. In these kinds of environments, heterogenous networks are usually encountered, consisting of a wide variety of devices, ranging from data centers to Internet of Things devices and sensors. As such, each individual system’s performance needs to be taken into account during the construction of the virtual backbone network, in order to maximize its efficiency based on the requirements of a considered service. To accomplish this, each node in the network is characterized by an appropriateness parameter, which indicates how appropriate a node is for a requested virtual backbone network. An algorithm for the construction of a CDS is extended to take this parameter into account. A low-cost wireless network installed in a university campus is used as an experimental testbed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is capable of constructing appropriate virtual backbone networks for smart tourism services which add reduced network overhead.