International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B4, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN 
AGRICULTURE 
S. A. Sawant *, J. Adinarayana, S. S. Durbha, A. K. Tripathy and D. Sudharsan 
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai 400076 Mumbai, 
Maharashtra, India — 
(suryakant_sawant, adi, sdurbha, aktripathy, sudharsan)@iitb.ac.in 
Special Session: EuroSDR, WG IV/2 
KEY WORDS: Syntactic standardization, Interoperability, Wireless Sensor Network, Sensor Web Enablement, Agriculture 
ABSTRACT: 
Rapid advances in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for agricultural applications has provided a platform for better decision 
making for crop planning and management, particularly in precision agriculture aspects. Due to the ever-increasing spread of 
WSNs there is a need for standards, i.e. a set of specifications and encodings to bring multiple sensor networks on common 
platform. Distributed sensor systems when brought together can facilitate better decision making in agricultural domain. The Open 
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) through Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) provides guidelines for semantic and syntactic 
standardization of sensor networks. In this work two distributed sensing systems (Agrisens and FieldServer) were selected to 
implement OGC SWE standards through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. Online interoperable data processing 
was developed through SWE components such as Sensor Model Language (SensorML) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS). An 
integrated web client was developed to visualize the sensor observations and measurements that enables the retrieval of crop water 
resources availability and requirements in a systematic manner for both the sensing devices. Further, the client has also the ability 
to operate in an interoperable manner with any other OGC standardized WSN systems. The study of WSN systems has shown that 
there is need to augment the operations / processing capabilities of SOS in order to understand about collected sensor data and 
implement the modelling services. Also, the very low cost availability of WSN systems in future, it is possible to implement the 
OGC standardized SWE framework for agricultural applications with open source software tools. 
1. INTRODUCTION All these services produce data in their specific format (Honda 
et al., 2009; Riquelme et al., 2009; Sudharsan et al., 2012; 
The implementation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Tripathy et al., 2011). It is difficult for users from diverse 
coupled with communication networks has become easier to — fields of study to understand the exact lineage of collected data 
measure the agro-meteorological and crop parameters in that gives rise to heterogeneous data formats and increases the 
precision agriculture (Díaz et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2011). difficulties in interoperability and data discovery. Hence, there 
Various field level studies across the world has shown that is a need for standard set of specifications and encodings to 
with precise monitoring and analysis of crop / weather ^ bring multiple sensor networks on common platform to resolve 
parameters, it is possible to judiciously allocate available the heterogeneity and data discovery issues (Durbha et al., 
resources in agriculture (Nash et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2010; 2010). 
Prabhakar et al., 2010; Li et al., 2011). Sensor Asia initiative 
has implemented WSN applications for crop, landslide and The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has brought 
glacier in Asia (Honda et al, 2008). In India, many standards for sensor networks through Sensor Web Enablement 
government, private and research institutes are implementing specifications (SWE) (Botts et al., 2006; Walter and Nash, 
WSN for natural resources and agriculture monitoring 2009). SWE aims at standardization through four standard 
applications, e.g. GramyaVikas: A distributed collaboration interface definitions for web services such as Sensor 
model for rural development planning (Adinarayana et al., Observation Service (SOS), Sensor Planning Service (SPS), 
2009), COMMON-Sense Net: improved water management for ^ Sensor Alert Service (SAS), Web Notification Service (WNS) 
resource-poor farmers via sensor network (Panchard et al., and three encodings for describing sensors and sensor 
2006; COMMON-Sense Net, 2011), etc. Sensor based services observations such as Sensor Model Language (SensorML), 
of Bhuvan for Land, Weather, Ocean and Disaster management Transducer Model Language (TML) and Observation and 
(NRSC, 2011), environmental sensor based services of Measurement (O&M) (OGC Standards, 2012). 
Ubiquitous Agriculture (uAgri C-DAC, 2011), mobile based 
agricultural advisory system mKRISHI (mKRISHI, 2011), etc. The main objective of this study is to propose and implement 
are few examples of the application of sensor technology for some of the components of SWE such as Sensor SensorML, 
monitoring natural phenomenon. and SOS, etc. for standardization of agriculture based 
GeoSense system (Sudharsan et al, 2012; Tripathy et a. 
2011), where two types of distributed sensing devices Were 
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