Enhancing Energy Saving in Smart Farming through Aggregation and Partition Aware IOT Routing Protocol †

Internet of things (IoT) for precision agriculture or Smart Farming (SF) is an emerging area of application. It consists essentially of deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs), composed of IP-enabled sensor nodes, in a partitioned farmland area. When the surface, diversity, and complexity of the farm increases, the number of sensing nodes increases, generating heavy exchange of data and messages, and thus leading to network congestion, radio interference, and high energy consumption. In this work, we propose a novel routing algorithm extending the well known IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL), the standard routing protocol used for IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). It is referred to as the Partition Aware-RPL (PA-RPL) and improves the performance of the standard RPL. In contrast to RPL, the proposed technique builds a routing topology enabling efficient in-network data aggregation, hence dramatically reducing data traffic through the network. Performance analysis of a typical/realistic precision agriculture case, considering the potato pest prevention from the well-known late blight disease, shows that PA-RPL improves energy saving up to [Formula: see text] compared to standard RPL.