Question

In taking a new business to Egypt. What technologies are emerging that could be used to solve the problem, and what are the costs associated with it, what cost level would be needed to solve the problem?

Answer 1

Here we are discussing business related to farming - the Precision farming solution using the wireless sensor network technology. While it is known that, Egypt originally an agricultural country, its people since the era of the Pharaohs are proud of land and agriculture, Egypt bears since a not close era from many problems concerning agriculture and crises facing a lot of important crops production size and quality causing shortcomings in their export size and also the self-satisfaction from them, threatening to aggravate the spectre of abandoning and letting the agricultural lands searching for other sources of income give more money, such as tourism and construction businesses.

The agriculture in Egypt needs more concern for farms and farmers, more advanced research in available recent agricultural technologies, more automation, and more testing and applying of new methods of study, analysis, and mechanization.

Precision Farming (PF), which is emerged as a management practice with the potential to increase profits by utilizing more precise information about agricultural resources through sensing and communication technology.

Precision farming and wireless sensor network overview:

Precision farming is the ability to handle variations in productivity within a field and maximize financial return, reduce waste and minimize impact of the environment using automated data collection, documentation and utilization of such information for strategic farm management decisions through sensing and communication technology.

Several technologies were used in the PF are:

• Remote Sensing (RS)
• Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Geographic Information System (GIS)

For the generation of maps of the soil it includes:

• Grid soil sampling
• Yield monitoring
• Crop scouting.

The sampling was typically through electronic sensors such as soil probes and remote optical scanners from satellites. These technologies apart from being non-real time involved the use of expensive technologies like satellite sensing and were labour intensive where the maps charting the agricultural fields were mostly manually done.

The Wireless sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes consist of sensing, processing, transmission, mobilizer, position finding system, and power units.

Sensor nodes are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. The position of sensor nodes does not need to be engineered or predetermined. Sensor nodes coordinate among themselves to produce high-quality information about the physical environment. Each of these scattered sensor nodes has the capability to collect and route data either to other sensors or back to an external base station.

WSN has several applications and several advantages over traditional data collection schemes such as:

• Real-time data can be accessed from the remote site and analysed and a real-time reaction taken upon it.
• Closed loop control ability (automation).
• Larger coverage area and high temporal and spatial resolution.
• Improved accuracy.
• Phenomena can be observed unobtrusively.
• Negative weather conditions do not affect a researcher’s work.
• Sensor nodes are small in size and weight and require no wiring which means that they are easy to install in most locations and applications.
• Usable for monitoring environments as contrasting as outbreaks of fire as well as glacier and also in rugged terrain, harsh, and inaccessible places.
• It is possible to have many users viewing the data simultaneously, and also manipulating it.
• Adaptability for different scenarios and sensor nodes can be re-tasked in the field (reconfiguration).
• Fewer personnel are required to perform data collection from remote sites.
• Relatively inexpensive, it has been suggested that the total system cost (for both materials and installation labour) can be reduced by over 80% by using commercially available WSNs over using a wired solution.
• Easy and brief deployment in the desired environment.
• Simple to use.
• Friendly GUI.
• Extremely versatile.
• Low maintenance.

So using WSN in PF applications will revolutionize the data collection in agricultural field, support the sought highly automated agriculture system which requires intensive sensing of environmental conditions at the ground level and rapid communication of the raw data to a local or remote server where the availability of computational and storage power, the identification of pests in the crops, drought or increased moisture, the decision making, and the control of farm equipment is done in real time (automated actuation devices like sprinklers, floggers, valve-controlled irrigation system, etc, can be used to control irrigation, fertilization and pest control in order to offset the adverse conditions forming Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN))

Advantages of Wireless Sensor Network in PF Application:

• Brought down the cost of deployment and running of a feasible PF framework.
• The sensing and communication can now be done on a real-time basis leading to better response times.
• Suitability for distributed data collecting and monitoring in tough environments.
• Capable to control an economical way of climate, irrigation and nutrient supply to produce the best crop condition, increase the production efficiency while decreasing cost and provide the real-time information.
• Gives better spatial and temporal variability than satellites.
• Permits collection of other soil and plant data different than satellite collects, as temperature, moisture, pH, and soil electrical conductivity.
• Ability to form a highly automated agriculture system.
• Gives better resolution.
• Ability to observe for long periods of time crop state.
• Analytical information storage in order to create a case record of the field crop.
• Friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) with the monitoring system.
• Potential to make exact evaluation of new crop methods and techniques.
• Potential for large area surveillance with high sampling densities.

Precision Farming in Egypt:

Devising a PF solution for the Egyptian agriculture entails performing some of anterior essential important steps. As well as the design of the system requires a comprehensive study and analysis of the technology used in building the system which is the WSN, it requires studying the conditions of the agriculture in Egypt generally and its challenges. Also, the application and evaluation of the system require the selection of a specific crop selected from the main crops in Egypt according to its importance and effect on the national income, and according to whether there are problems weaken its production and lead to other problems such as lack of self-sufficiency of it, its loss after harvesting, financial loss for farmers, and ban of its export which causes a big monetary loss for the country. The selected crop should be studied in details and analysed considering all the agricultural processes it passes by from tillage, cultivation, irrigation, harvesting, and storage and what this covers from methods and tools, what are its past, current, and expectable problems and the proposed methods (if any) to overcome them.

Generally, the problems facing agricultural production in Egypt and the achievement of food security can be summarized as follows:

• Problems related to climatic factors which are signs of a danger because the decrease or the altitude of temperature affects the feddan productivity as a result for its effect on the activity of the plant’s enzymes.
• Second, problems related to terrestrial factors which represented by the soil and its physical and chemical properties that directly affect the productivity per feddan.
• Problems related to human factors which indoors may cause climate change and include irresponsible behaviors, such as the unlimited thermal emission caused by the industry, and the nonuse of agricultural counseling well and ignorance of the farmer of the best ways to deal with the crop and the modern methods in agriculture.
• Problems is related to the diseases and pests which may devour the complete crop.

Although the genetic engineering and biotechnology play an important role in dealing with these problems, more innovative solutions using modern technologies is very important also it is logical and necessary to catch up with the developed countries. To efficiently manage Egypt’s complex agricultural production system and vast irrigation and drainage networks the acquisition of accurate and timely crop data is essential using a complete PF solution using WSN technology.

Potato crop PF in Egypt:

It is the world’s fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat and maize. In Egypt, the crop was introduced on a small scale during the nineteenth century. It is nowadays the second most important vegetable crop after tomato, where about 20% of total area devoted for vegetable production is cultivated with potato, and Egypt is one of the largest producers and exporters of potatoes in Africa.

This crop is economically important to Egypt and any disturbance in its production affects severely its local and more importantly export impact, perhaps the greatest example of this is the big existing problem of the Russia’s decision to ban the Egyptian potato exports due to its infection with brown rot, this problem causes a loss estimated at 2 billion pounds which is the value of the potato export to Russia annually.

Proposing the Most Suitable Routing Protocol:

The PF and some other applications need a comprehensive, easy-to-use querying system, so that reliable and accurate answers can be obtained with minimal delays. As all of these features can be provided by the Periodic Threshold-sensitive Energy-Efficient sensor Network (APTEEN) routing strategy, it could be concluded that it is the most suitable routing idea for PF.

APTEEN:

It is a hierarchical cluster-based routing protocol in which the nodes are grouped into clusters; each cluster has member nodes and one head node responsible for receiving, aggregating, and transmitting the data of its cluster members.

The main features of APTEEN routing:

• It combines both proactive and reactive policies. By sending periodic data, it provides a complete picture of the network to the user, like a proactive scheme. It also senses data continuously and responds immediately to drastic changes, thereby making it responsive to time critical situations, like a reactive network.
• Energy saving by using TDMA schedule for transmission which enables nodes to sleep and prevents collisions among cluster members.
• Energy saving as the node senses the environment continuously and only transmits if hard threshold condition met.
• Energy consumption can be controlled by changing the count time as well as the threshold values.
• Centralized nature of the protocol makes the base station forms an optimal clustering and able to appoint a fixed number of nodes as cluster heads versus a percentage may not be satisfied sometimes.
• Supports a query handling mechanism.
• Small response delay, because the base station can be placed near the network deployment area, the structure of the network can be limited to one-level clustering which involves only two hops to reach the sink, this can compensate the delay resulted due to using the TDMA schedule. In addition, the PF is one of the applications that tolerate reasonable delay.

Cost:

The communication cost of the system which depends on the communication distances between sensors and their corresponding cluster head, the number of cluster heads, the number of member nodes, and the selection of the cluster heads is controllable by the base station as the network is centralized.

The expected outcome:

It should be noted that the market for wireless sensors has a steady increase over the past decade. In 2004, 500,000 wireless sensor networks have been sold, and this number increased to 10 million in 2006. In terms of dollars, shipments of wireless products increase three times.

According to IDTechEx research in the new report “Wireless Sensor Networks 2011–2021”, the Market Value of Wireless Sensor Network reaches approximately 280 US$ million in 2010 and 400 US$ million in 2011 and it will grow rapidly to $1.75 billion in 2019 and $2 billion in 2021.

Researchers at Intel expect that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years, resulting in more features, increased performance, decreased cost per transistor and volume production, so, nodes could drop in price to less than $5 each over the next several years.

The cultivated land with potato on Egypt currently reaches about 160,000 feddan yearly. Assuming as just mentioned that the cost of one sensor node would approximately be $5, then we need approximately 408 million Egyptian pound for equipping potato yearly cultivated land with sensor nodes, by adding the cost of base stations, the total cost may be 417 million and 600,000 Egyptian pound.

This cost with respect to the yearly benefit from exporting potato crop after recovering the loss from its export preventing, after the expected consequence of increasing the yield size and quality, after the expected savings in the resources used in cultivation such as the fertilizer and irrigation water, and after recovering the monetary loss results from the harms caused by excessive use of pesticides, is acceptable; it can be said that this cost can be recovered in one year.