CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
Through the
ages agriculture production
systems have benefited
from the
incorporation of technological
advances primarily developed for other industries.
The
industrial age brought
mechanization and synthesized
fertilizers, the
technological age offered genetic
engineering and now the information age brings
the potential for Precision
Agriculture (Rasher, 2001).
Precision agriculture (PA) ,
satellite farming or Site Specific Crop Management
(SSCM) can be
defined as a
set of technologies
that have helped
propel
agriculture into
the computerized information-based world,
and is designed
to
help farmers
get greater control
over the management
of farm operations
(Gandonou, 2005).
One of the
key technologies of
precision agriculture is the
control and accurate measurement of
the soil moisture. For decades, the subject
of
soil moisture has
been of great
interest in agricultural
system. Prior to
advancement in agriculture, farmer has picked up and felt a
handful of soil to
determine the best time to plow his
fields and equally to manually determine the
amount of moisture content of the
soil. Soil moisture measurement ranges from
the
method of feeling
the soil to
the use of complicated electronic
equipment
using radioactive substances. Such
method includes the use of soil sensor. Since
the inception of precision
agriculture, soil sensors have been used to measure the
soil moisture
level. The soil
moisture sensors measure
the volumetric water
content of
the soil by
using electrical resistance,
dielectric constant, etc. The
farmer uses
the information obtained
from the soil
moisture sensor to
make
adequate and accurate
decisions on how
and when to
irrigate or plough
his
farmland.
Today, technological
progress in communication, along
with the information
revolution has reduced the amount
of work done by the farmer and has since then
increased yield. Precision
agricultural technologies, such as Global Positioning
Systems (GPS), Geographic Information
Systems (GIS), remote sensing,
yield
monitors, and guidance systems
for variable rate application, made it possible to
manage within-field variation on
large scales. The GIS is a software application
that is
designed to provide
the tools to
manipulate and display
spatial data
(Blackmore, 1993). These
technologies allow detection and/or characterization
of
an object, series
of objects, or
the landscape without
having the sensor
in
physical contact (Viacheslav et al., 2003). General Packet Radio System (GPRS)
is a third-generation step toward
internet access. GPRS is also known as Global
System Mobile Communication Internet Protocol
(GSM-IP). GSM-IP keeps the
users of this system online, allows
to make voice calls, and access internet on-
the-go. Even
Time Division Multiple
Access (TDMA) users
benefit from this
system as
it provides packet
radio access. GPRS
also permits the
network
operators to
execute an Internet
Protocol (IP) based
core architecture for
integrated voice and data
applications that will continue to be used and expanded
for
3G services. GPRS
supersedes the wired
connections, as this
system has
simplified access to the packet
data networks like the internet. The packet radio
principle is employed by GPRS to
transport user data packets in a structure way
between GSM mobile stations and
external packet data networks. These packets
can be directly routed to the
packet switched networks from the GPRS mobile
stations. In the current versions
of GPRS, networks based on the Internet Protocol
