Machine Learning Based Data Reduction in WSN for Smart Agriculture

Abstract

Nowadays, the agriculture domain faces a lot of challenges for a better usage of its natural resources. For this purpose, and for the increasing danger of climate change, there is a need to locally monitor meteorological data and soil conditions to help make quicker and more adapted decision for the culture. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can serve as a monitoring system for those types of features. However, WSN suffer from the limited energy resources of the motes which shorten the lifetime of the overall network. Every mote periodically captures the monitored feature and sends the data to the sink for further analysis depending on a certain sampling rate. This process of sending big amount of data causes a high energy consumption of the sensor node and an important bandwidth usage on the network. In this paper, a Machine Learning based Data Reduction Algorithm (MLDR) is introduced. MLDR focuses on environmental data for the benefits of agriculture. MLDR is a data reduction approach which reduces the amount of transmitted data to the sink by adding some machine learning techniques at the sensor node level by keeping data availability and accuracy at the sink. This data reduction helps reduce the energy consumption and the bandwidth usage and it enhances the use of the medium while maintaining the accuracy of the information. This approach is validated through simulations on MATLAB using real temperature data-sets from Weather-Underground sensor network. Results show that the amount of sent data is reduced by more than $70\%$ while maintaining a very good accuracy with a variance that did not surpass 2$^\circ$.