Environmental Monitoring and Control System

for a Poultry Farm Using Wireless Sensor

Network
Muhammad Uzair, Amaad Khalil, Mohsin Murad

Arif Ali Shah, Syed M. Ali, Khawaja M. Yahya, G. M. Hassan

Department of Computer Systems Engineering

University of Engineering and Technology
Peshawar, Pakistan
{kmuk_a, amadkhalil, mohsin_murad}@yahoo.com

Department of Computer Systems Engineering

University of Engineering and Technology
Peshawar, Pakistan
{arfimania, mohd.alisyed, yahyakm, gmjally}@yahoo.com

Abstract For precise translation of local climate variables of a

poultry farm into control variables, data gathering and thus
transducer deployment at multiple locations becomes a necessity.
In this paper, a Poultry Farm Monitoring and Control System
based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is proposed and
developed. This system uses Crossbows TelosB motes integrated
with commercial sensors capable of measuring temperature and
humidity values. The data from the sensors is transmitted to the
controller/actuator circuitry through a work station that controls
local heating, ventilation and/or some other factors which are
affecting the poultry farms interior climate. This paper presents
an automated monitoring and control systems for poultry farms.
The feasibility of the developed system was tested by deploying
the proposed system at Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Agricultural
Universitys research poultry farm in Peshawar in the KPK
Province of Pakistan. In this experiment, initially the data is
collected to test and evaluate the WSNs reliability and control
systems ability to manipulate the actuator circuitry.
Keywords-component; poultry farm; monitoring; control system;
wsn; wireless sensor network; motes.

I.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of controlling humidity and temperature of a

poultry farm is to provide the optimized environment
for poultry nourishment. Humidity control is an important tool
to prevent the spread of broiler diseases in poultry farms.
Normally, the range of healthy relative humidity for the
broilers is from 30% to 60%. Maintaining an optimal poultry
farm climate especially during the summer and winter seasons
can help improve the productivity of the farm and economize
the energy usage.
In technologically sophisticated poultry farms, various
measurement spots are required to record various parameters,
defining the local climate in different parts of the large poultry
farm to make the automation and control system work
efficiently. A WSN consisting of small nodes (motes)
equipped with a radio transceiver and one or many sensors can
be an attractive, modular and inexpensive option in building
the poultry farm monitoring system. The integration of local
processing and storage allows sensor nodes to perform
complex filtering and triggering functions, as well as the
implementation of application-specific or sensor-specific data
compression algorithms. The ability to communicate not only

allows information and control to be communicated across the

network of nodes, but nodes to cooperate in performing more
complex tasks, like statistical sampling, data aggregation, and
system health and status monitoring [1],[2]. In advance
poultry farm monitoring system, temperature and humidity
parameters can only be monitored. In order to provide the
suitable environment such as temperature and humidity, one
has to manually activate/deactivate different devices like
exhaust, air conditioner, fan, etc. which is cumbersome for
humans and now an obsolete mechanism. It is possible to
automate the monitoring of these environmental parameters
instead of using the conventional monitoring system.
Conventional poultry farms rely exclusively on a single
centralized measuring point to provide feedback to the poultry
farms automation system. These systems are usually not
equipped with the option of controlling zonal thermostat,
ventilation and/or any other environmental control variable.
The expanse of poultry farms has increased exponentially and
the provision of various options such as, local adjustments to
the heating, ventilation and other poultry farm support systems
is currently improvised. Provision of these facilities is made
possible by the automation system whose accuracy directly
depends upon number of measured values. Increasing the
accuracy translates into increasing the number of measurement
spots, which directly raises the cost. So, a trade-off has to be
reached between the cost and accuracy. The system provides
flexibility of relocating the measurement spots according to
the particular needs, which depends on the control plant,
possible changes in the external weather or the poultry farm
structure.
Wireless sensor networks are playing a pivotal role in the
field of computational science and telecommunication.
Wireless Sensor Networks can prove to be a useful part of the
automated control system architecture in modern poultry
farms. In the proceeding work, the initial step taken towards
WSN based poultry farm automation system is building a
monitoring and control system and testing its feasibility with a
simple experimental setup.
A commercial sensor [7] was superimposed on Crossbows
TelosB platform. This enabled the evaluation of two climatic
variables: relative humidity and temperature. The network
operates upon Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) [3], which

allows the collection and transmission of data from the

network to the sink mote over IEEE 802.15.4. The
temperature and humidity parameters are controlled by
computer through parallel port and a java application is used
to enable/disable different devices automatically. Each control
signal generated is fed to a relay, which is used to switch the
equipment on or off by providing the required voltage to the
devices.
II.

RELATED WORK

Alan Mainwaring et al. [4] have conducted a preliminary

comprehensive study of the application of wireless sensor
networks to real-world habitat monitoring. The hardware
design of the nodes, the design of the sensor network, and the
capabilities for remote data access and management is
governed by a set of system design requirements. A complete
system architecture has been proposed to address these
requirements for habitat monitoring of seabird nesting
environment [4].
Ayahiko et al. [5] have conducted extensive research in a
broiler-house environmental system deploying sensor network
and mail delivery system. Their proposition consists of
integration of sensor network with the mail delivery system
which produces a hybrid system that observes an
environmental change of the broiler-house. Such an
environmental system observes broiler-houses and generates a
message based on the summary data from the cellular phone.
A local wireless network of sensor modules placed in each
broiler-house collects data and makes it available for decision
-making. Afterwards the system needs a reliable internet
connection to upload the data online and make it available for
user manipulation. [5].
III.

tens of seconds. A java application using a communication api

would transfer data to the actuator/relays circuitry through
parallel port that has eight lines for parallel data transmission.
The parallel port was chosen in this application because the
goal was to build a quick, simple and inexpensive interface.
The parallel port interface is based around a 74HC05 logic
chip along with some passive components.
A serial port solution on the other hand would require a
microcontroller, firmware, programmer or in-systemprogrammability, level translators, crystal oscillator as well as
many other passive components. Likewise, Universal Serial
Bus (USB) also requires a considerable amount of hardware,
in addition to a much greater software and firmware
investment. Furthermore, debugging USB hardware often
requires very expensive protocol analyzers. But before the
final decision is made, the drawbacks must also be analyzed to
ensure that they are tolerable. As the computer receives the
temperature and humidity values, the java application
monitors the parametric values and then sends control signals
to the control circuitry i.e. relays to enable/disable different
devices. Besides that, the Java Communications API cleverly
unifies the programming model for dealing with an extensive
range of external ports. It supports both serial (RS232/434,
COM, or tty) and parallel (printer, LPT) ports. So, in terms of
our goal, the selection seems to be an obvious choice of
parallel port. The architecture of proposed monitoring and
control system is presented in Figure 1.

POULTRY FARM CONTROL SYSTEM

There are two common classes of control systems, with

many variations and combinations: logical or sequential
controls and feedback or linear controls. Temperature and
humidity are two key factors that rapidly deteriorate the
environment and thus dynamic control of both is inevitable for
healthy chicken environment. Temperature and humidity are
closely linked together in a poultry farm. Cold air has a lower
tendancy to hold moisture, therefore, the decrease of the
relative humidity is signifies increased air temperature [6].
Poultry farm monitoring and control can be divided into three
main tasks: Measuring, calculating and adjusting. The
measured values of the climate variables are first converted
from analog to digital and then transmitted to the computer
using a sink mote.
A major problem of conventional system is that signal,
originating at a measuring point, gets degraded when
travelling through medium due to the onset limitations. So
signal needs reconstruction at different levels. On the other
hand WSN first takes a record of the measured values and then
sends these values forward so the only task for receiver is
receive and regenerate if the message is to be relayed to the
next node. In the continuation of work by Mohsin et al [6] the
processing time to generate control signal remains that of few

Figure 1.WSN based monitoring and control system.

IV.

IMPLEMENTATION

A. The Poultry Farm

The experiments were performed in KPK Agricultural
Universitys research poultry farm [7] in Peshawar in Khyber
Pakhtoonkhwa Province of Pakistan as shown in Figure 2.
The four major zones of a poultry farm are: feeding,
hatchery, multiplier breeder flocks which provides broiler
hatching eggs and eggs production zone. The climate of each
zone depends upon the chicken population and its location
amongst the other zones. The setup deployed works for
maximum range due to relatively unhindered environment for
communication amongst the motes. As a matter of practice,
the precautionary distance between the communicating motes
was kept less than 50 meters in the deployment.

with expensive signal processing, this architecture provides

higher robustness against occlusions and component failures.

Figure 3. Crossbow's TelosB Mote with integrated

temperature, humidity and light sensors.

Figure 2. Motes deployed in various locations at KPK

Agricultural University's Research Facility.
B. Sensors
For measuring temperature and relative humidity,
Sensirion SHT11 sensors were used. Both sensors are
impeccably coupled to a 14-bit analog to digital converter and
a serial interface circuit. The 2-wire serial interface and
internal voltage regulation allows easy and fast system
integration. Temperature accuracy of the sensor is 0.3C and
the accuracy of the relative humidity is under 2 %. The tiny
size and low power consumption makes SHT11 an optimal
choice for many applications.
C. Motes
The wireless sensor nodes used are Crossbows TelosB
Motes.
Key features of the mote include data rate of 250
kbps, frequency of 2.4 GHz, IEEE 802.15.4 communication
protocol using Chipcon Wireless Transceiver, Integrated ADC,
DAC, Supply Voltage Supervisor, DMA Controller etc. as
mentioned in Figure 3. It also has integrated onboard antenna
with 50m range indoors / 125m range outdoor. It also has USB
based programming and data collection, a low-power MSP430
Microcontroller with extended memory and an optional sensor
suite. The motes use a built in battery pack having two AA
batteries as power source.
D. System Architecture
Tier based architecture is developed for the proposed
system shown in Figure 4. The bottom tier consists of motes
that perform general purpose computing and networking in
addition to application-specific sensing. The sensor nodes
deployed are widely separated. The lowest level of the sensing
application is provided by autonomous sensor nodes. These
small, battery-powered devices are placed in regions under
observation. Each sensor node collects environmental data
primarily about its immediate surroundings. Compared with
traditional approaches, which use a few high quality sensors

The sensor nodes transmit their data through the sensor

network to the sensor network gateway. The gateway is
responsible for transmitting sensor data from the sensor patch
through a local transit network to the remote base station that
provides parametric data to the computer. Finally, the data is
monitored in java application running on server that is
connected to the base station. It generates control signals and
transmits them over parallel link to the relays to enable/disable
actuating devices respectively in order to achieve suitable
environment.

Figure 4. Tier-based architecture of the proposed system.

V.

RESULTS

Motes were deployed in different zones of poultry farm for

acquiring information of humidity and temperature variables.

Figure 5. Relays connected to Parallel Port

In the few hours time, every mote read temperature and

relative humidity values after a short span of time. During the
tests, the distance between the individual measuring mote and
the base station mote was increased until the communication
was lost to measure the maximum possible operating distance.
Whenever the temperature or relative humidity crosses the
threshold value the Actuator circuitry comes into action and
the fans and exhausts are autonomously turned ON through
relays. Figure 6 shows the effect of the actuation, it is clear
from the graph that the relative humidity is decreasing.
Comparison between temperature and humidity values
shows how variables are linked together and it is analyzed that
the thermostat progressively increases at the same time due to
the effects of actuation when moisture drops as shown in
Figure 6 & 7.

environment, such as different climate layers which exist from

poultry farm ventilation windows to the center. The SHT11
heat and moisture sensor is well suited for wireless sensor
nodes which are powered by batteries. The exhausts, fans and
dehumidifiers were switched on and off accordingly by the
actuator circuitry on the basis of the humidity and temperature
values from the WSN. When the desired/suitable environment
is achieved, the java API transmits the control signals to the
actuator circuitry and the devices are switched off.
VII. REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]

[6]
[7]
[8]

Figure 6. Relative Humidity values from the motes.

Figure 7. Temperature values from the motes.

VI.

CONCLUSION

This paper presents a complete environmental control

solution based on WSN for poultry farms. Continuous
environmental monitoring combined with autonomous
actuators makes a vigorous system which needs little human
involvement. The measurements indicates that the system is
able to detect the local anomalies in the poultry farm

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