AnaMap: A Methodology of Simulation and Visualization for Actual Farmland Topography

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used in agricultural productions. As a critical problems in WSNs, node deployment has a direct impact on the effectiveness of routing and data fusion operations as well as on the accuracy of anticipated coverage in several agricultural scenarios, e.g., mono-crop and mixed-crop farmlands. Network simulations are necessary for testing the effectiveness of deployment algorithms, but some of them lack the accuracy of real-world deployments. This is due to the fact that analogue maps in these network simulations do not take into account the nature of the terrain, for example obstacles such as buildings and trees in the line of vision for sensors, uneven surfaces and elevations for hilly terrains, the node locations obtained by the deployment algorithms in these analogue maps cannot be mapped to the actual farmland. In this paper, we present a methodology of constructing analogue map called AnaMap for providing both simulation and visualization of the actual farmland with the characteristic of partition structure and irregular boundary to assist the investigation of node deployment algorithms in agricultural environment. One case study is described to prove the usability of AnaMap.