Energy Efficient Data Dissemination for Large-Scale Smart Farming Using Reinforcement Learning

Smart farming is essential to increasing crop production, and there is a need to consider the technological advancements of this era; modern technology has helped us to gain more accuracy in fertilizing, watering, and adding pesticides to the crops, as well as monitoring the conditions of the environment. Nowadays, more and more sophisticated sensors are being developed, but on a larger scale, agricultural networks and the efficient management of them is very crucial in order to obtain proper benefits from technology. Our idea is to achieve sustainability in large-scale farms by improving communication between wireless sensor nodes and base stations. We want to increase communication efficiency by introducing machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning is the area of machine learning which is concerned with how involved agents are supposed to take action in specified environments to maximize reward and achieve a common goal. In our network, a large number of sensors are being deployed on large-scale fields; reinforcement learning is used to find the optimal set of paths towards the base station. After a number of successful paths have been developed, they are then used to transmit the sensed data from the fields. The simulation results have shown that in larger scales, our proposed model had less transmission delay than the shortest path transmission model and broadcasting techniques that were tested against the data transmission paths developed by reinforcement learning.