Animal behavior management by energy-efficient wireless sensor networks

In recent years, studies have been conducted on systems based on wireless sensor networks for the detection of animal behaviors. These systems can offer significant information on how to increase the production and animals' health. They consist of low-cost sensor nodes with limited resources. One of the critical resources is the power unit. These systems have an energy problem especially in outdoor environments same as other wireless sensor-based systems. ZigBee-based RF modules are used for data transmissions in these systems. Hence, they have limited battery and memory. To fulfill the requirements of power reduction, this paper proposes a technique based on time-driven systems for controlling the transmission rate of ZigBee-based RF modules based on data aggregation and sleep/wake-up methods. Data aggregation is done in many cases. However, the sleep/wake-up method is related to animal behavior because it may cause changes in the network topology. The proposed system is implemented on cows and the results show that the proposed system can help to achieve a significant reduction in power consumption of wireless sensor networks and improve the lifetime. In additional, it can offer and help to liable of animals in monitoring the health of their animals.