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Vol. 3, Issue 5, Sep-Oct 2013, pp.194-197

RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS

Wireless Sensor Network System to Monitor The Fish Farm

Kirankumar G.Sutar 1, Prof.Ramesh T.Patil 2
1
Master of Technology. Department of Electronics & Telecommunication Rajarambapu Institute of Technology,
Islampur, (MS), India
2
Associate Professor,Department of Electronics & Telecommunication Rajarambapu Institute of Technology,
Islampur, (MS), India

Abstract-
In recent years, the interest in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been growing dramatically. To meet this
trend, we have designed Wireless Sensor Network system to monitor the fish farm. We present a practical appli-
cation of wireless network. The application requires two different kinds of modules; the sensor itself and the
wireless module. The sensor collects and transmits the information to a wireless module using wired connection.
Once the information reaches the wireless node, it is forwarded to the central unit through a wireless protocol.
The sensor module includes a temperature sensor and pH sensor. The wireless node collects the sensed data by
means of an asynchronic wired serial polling communication. The use of this kind of protocol allows connecting
a single master with multiple slaves. In our particular case, we have connected one master with two slaves using
a transmission rate of 9600 bits per second. The wireless transmission follows the standard IEEE 802.15.4 and
implements the routing protocol based on the ZigBee standard.
Keywords- pH, Temperature, Wireless Sensor Network, ZigBee.

I. INTRODUCTION Recent technological advances led to the de-

Water quality determines not only how well velopment of very small sensor devices with computa-
fish grow in an aquaculture operation, but whether or tional, data storage and communicational capabilities.
not the survive. Fish influence water quality through These devices, which called wireless sensor nodes,
processes like nitrogen metabolism and respiration. when are deployed in an area form a Wireless Sensor
Knowledge of testing procedures and interpretation of Network (WSN). WSN can operate in a wide range of
results are important to the fish farmer. Each water environments and provide advantages in cost, size,
quality factor interacts with influences over parame- power, flexibility and distributed intelligence, com-
ters, sometimes in complex ways [2]. pared to wired ones.
Regardless the kind of water available or the A WSN is a system comprised of radio fre-
species chosen, all fish depend entirely on water to quency (RF) transceivers, sensors, microcontrollers
live, eat, grow and perform other bodily functions. and power sources.
Therefore is no surprise that the success of a fish farm- Recent advances in wireless sensor network-
ing establishment lies greatly on its water quality. The ing technology have led to the development of low
temperature and Ph are some parameters that are con- cost, low power, multifunctional sensor nodes. Sensor
sidered to be the most important in aquaculture [3]. nodes enable environment sensing together with data
This paper shows a practical application; the processing. Instrumented with a variety of sensors,
monitoring of a fish farm using temperature and pH such as temperature, humidity and volatile compound
sensors. Usually those kinds of tests require a very detection, allow monitoring of different environments.
specialized and qualified staff, who should measure They are able to network with other sensor systems and
periodically the living conditions of the farm with high exchange data with external users [4].
accuracy. However, it is not feasible to perform these Currently two standard technologies are avail-
measurements manually with enough periodicity to able for WSN: ZigBee and Bluetooth. Both operate
detect immediate changes or predict possible events. within the Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM)
The implementation of an ambient intelligence Wire- band of 2.4 GHz, which provides license free opera-
less Sensor Network makes it possible. The wireless tions, huge spectrum allocation and worldwide compa-
sensor network consists of two main parts, transmitting tibility [9].
side and receiving side. At the transmitting side, vari- Table 1 provides a comparison between Zig-
ous sensors, microcontroller and transceiver will be Bee and Bluetooth. For applications where higher data
used and at the receiving side the transceiver and Per- rates are important, Bluetooth clearly has the advantage
sonal Computer will be used to monitor the sensed since it can support a wider range of traffic types than
parameters [1]. ZigBee. However, the power consumption in a sensor
network is of primary importance and
II. WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK
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Vol. 3, Issue 5, Sep-Oct 2013, pp.194-197

it should be extremely low. Bluetooth is probably the 1. Microcontroller

closest peer to WSNs, but its power consumption has The LPC2148 are based on a 16/32 bit
been of secondary importance in its design. Bluetooth ARM7TDMI-S CPU with real time emulation and em-
is therefore not suitable for applications that require bedded trace support, together with 128/512 kilobytes
ultra-low power consumption; turning on and off con- (KB) of embedded high speed flash memory. A 128 bit
sumes a great deal of energy. In contrast, the ZigBee wide memory interface and unique accelerator archi-
protocol places primary importance on power man- tecture enable 32 bit code execution at maximum clock
agement; it was developed for low power consumption rate. For critical code size applications, the alternative
and years of battery life. Bluetooth devices have lower 16 bit thumb mode reduces code by more than 305
battery life compared to ZigBee, as a result of the with minimal performance penalty with their compact
processing and protocol management overhead which 64 pin package, low power consumption, various 32 bit
is required for ad hoc networking. Also, ZigBee pro- timers,4 channel 10 bit ADC,USB port, PWM channels
vides higher network flexibility than Bluetooth, allow- and 46 GPIO lines with up to 9 external interrupt pins
ing different topologies. ZigBee allows a larger number [6].
of nodes – more than 65,000 Sensors – according to With a wide range of serial communications,
specification [10]. interfaces they are also very well suited for communi-
Table 1: Comparison between Bluetooth and ZigBee. cation gateways, protocol converters and embedded
soft modems as well as many other general-purpose
Bluetooth ZigBee applications [7, 8].
Standards IEEE 802.15.1 IEEE 802.15.4 2. ZigBee Network
Data rate 1 Mb s-1 20-250 kb s-1 ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level
Latency (time to < 10 s 30 ms communication protocols using small, low power digi-
establish a new tal radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal
link) 2.4 GHz 2.4 GHz area network. The technology defined by the ZigBee
Frequencies 8 65,000 specifications is intended to be simpler and less expen-
No. of nodes 8 m (Class II, 1-100 m sive than other WPANs such as Bluetooth [5]. ZigBee
Range III) to 100 m is targeted at radio frequency applications that require a
(Class I) DSSS 1 low data rate, long battery life and secure networking
Modulation FHSS 2 Ad hoc, star, [9].
Network topolo- Ad hoc piconets mesh
gy Audio, graph- Small data 3. Sensors
Data type ics, pictures, packet A sensor is a device that measures a physical
files quantity and converts it into a signal which can read by
Battery life 1 week > 1 year an observer or by an instrument.
Extendibility No Yes
A. Temperature Sensor
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Temperature sensor used is IC LM35 which is
linear temperature sensor and linear temperature-to-
Transmitting side Receiving side voltage convertor. The convertor provides accurately
linear and directly proportional output signal in milli-
Micro Zigbee Zigbee Interfacing volts over the temperature range of 00C to 1Volt at
Controller Transceiver Transceiver circuit 1000C and any voltage measurement circuit connected
across the output pins can read the temperature direct-
ly. The LM35 does not require any external calibration.
The LM35’s low output impedance, linear output and
precision inherent calibration makes interfacing to rea-
dout or control circuitry especially easy [10].
Personal
Temperature pH Computer
sensor Sensor B .pH Sensor
pH is a measure of how acidic or basic (alka-
Figure 1: System Block Diagram line) a solution is. In any given solution some atoms of
water dissociate to form hydrogen ions (H+) and hy-
The modules included in the system architec- droxyl ions (OH-). The Ph scale is a means of showing
ture are as follows- which ion has greater concentration. At a pH of 7.0, the
1. Microcontroller concentrations of hydrogen ions and hydroxyl ions are
2. ZigBee Network equal, and the water is said to be neutral. Pure water
3. Sensors has a Ph of 7.0. When the pH is less than 7.0, there are
more hydrogen ions than hydroxyl ions, and the water
is said to be acidic. When the pH is greater than 7.0,

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Vol. 3, Issue 5, Sep-Oct 2013, pp.194-197

there are more hydroxyl ions than hydrogen ions and

the water is said to be basic or alkaline.
pH sensor measure hydrogen ion activity and
produce a voltage. The sensor operates based on the
principle that an electric potential develops when two
liquids of different pH levels come into contact on op-
posite sides of a thin glass membrane. The pH sensors
today are composed of two main parts; a glass elec-
trode known as the measurement electrode and the
reference electrode. The tip of the measurement elec-
trode is a thin glass membrane. The thin glass mem-
brane is able to facilitate ion exchange. As the ions
exchange they create a voltage that is measured by the
measurement electrode. This voltage is converted into
a corresponding pH level. The reference electrode’s
potential is kept constant. This is possible because the
reference electrode’s fill solution is kept at a pH of 7.
The pH sensor is a passive sensor, which
means there is not a need for a voltage or current
source. The sensor is classified as a bipolar sensor be-
cause the electrode’s output can swing above and be- Figure 4: pH-Electrode Circuit
low the reference point. The sensor produces a voltage
output that is linearly dependent on the pH of the solu- The circuit in Figure 4 solves all design chal-
tion it is placed in. lenges. Amplifier U1 offsets the pH electrode by 512
mV. This is achieved by using National’s LM4140A-
1.0 precision micro-power low-dropout voltage refer-
ence that produces an accurate 1.024V. That voltage is
divided in half to equal 512 mV by the 10 kΩ resistor
divider. The output of amplifier U1, which is set up in
a unity-gain con-figuration, biases the reference elec-
Figure 2: pH Scale trode of the pH electrode with the same voltage, 512
mV, at low impedance. The pH-measuring electrode
will produce a voltage which rides on top of this 512
mV bias voltage. In effect, the circuit shifts the bipolar
pH-electrode signal to a unipolar signal for use in a
single-supply system.
The second amplifier U2 is set up in a unity-
gain configuration and buffers the output of the pH
electrode. Again, a high-input impedance buffer be-
tween the pH electrode and the measurement instru-
ment allows the circuit to interface with a greater varie-
ty of measurement instruments including those with
lower input impedance. In most applications, the out-
put voltage of the pH electrode is high enough to use
without additional amplification. If amplification is
required, this circuit can easily be modified by adding
gain resistors to U2 [7].

IV. PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION

The prototype wireless sensor network system
is designed and the sensors are fixed in the fish farm.
We have considered the pH range between 5 to 9 and
Figure 3: Measurement Electrode Diagram temperature range between 300C to450C. The upper
threshold value is considered. If the threshold value of
any of the parameter changes, the indicator indicates it.
The base station consists of a same Zigbee module
programmed as a coordinator that receives the data sent
from the sensor node wirelessly. Data received from
the sensor node is sent to the computer using the RS
232 protocol and data received is displayed using the

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Vol. 3, Issue 5, Sep-Oct 2013, pp.194-197

built GUI on the base monitoring station. The follow- Information Technology (IJCSIT), Vol 3, No
ing figure 5 shows the built GUI using National In- 1, Pp. 53-57. June 2010
struments LabVIEW. [6] V.Monika, M.Sugdev, “Multi-tasking and
Time Scheduling Implementation Using
µC/OS-II and ARM Processor” International
Conference on Computing and Control Engi-
neering, April, 2012.
[7] IEEE “Wireless medium access control
(MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifica-
tions for low rate wireless personal area net-
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trical and Electronics Engineers Inc.: New
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[8] Qingshan, S.; Ying, L.; Gareth, D.; Brown, D.
“Wireless intelligent sensor networks for re-
Figure 5: GUI using National Instruments LabVIEW. frigerated vehicle”. In IEEE 6th Symposium
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V. CONCLUSION less Communication, Shanghai, China, 2004.
In this paper, fish farm monitoring system [9] Zigbee Alliance,www.zigbee.org
based on wireless sensor network is presented. The [10] National semiconductors, at national.com
system is constituted by a base station and sensor
nodes. Data connection between the node and base Kirankumar G.Sutar
station is realized using wireless sensor network tech- He is a Master’s candidate in Business
nology. In the node side, water quality data such as pH Studies. He holds B.E. in Electronics en-
and temperature is collected by sensors. The sensed gineering from Shivaji Universi-
parameters with their exact precision values are trans- ty,Kolhapur,.He is interested in the appli-
mitted to the observing station through wireless com- cations of wireless sensor network for the environmen-
munication and details are monitored by the adminis- tal monitoring .He is currently working toward the
trator. M.Tech degree in Electronics from the Department of
When any of the parameter is found to be Electronics and Telecommunication,RIT,Islampur
above a threshold value an indicator will indicate it. (MS).
Finally, the prototype system with a sensor nodes
and base station is designed and implemented. Real- Prof.Ramesh T.Patil
time water quality data can be seen from a GUI win- He has 16 Years of experience in the
dow in Personal Computer. The system has advantages field of Academic and is actively involved
such as low power consumption, more flexible to dep- in research and development activities. He
loy and so on. obtained his Masters degree (Electronics)
from Shivaji University, Kolhapur. Presently he is
REFERENCES working as an Associate Professor at RIT, Islampur
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of pH and temperature in a fish farm” IEEE IETE, Kolhapur Region. His area of specialization is
2010 Conference. VLSI, Embedded Systems, Microprocessor and Micro-
[2] Santoshkumar, Vishal Hiremath, “Design and controller.
Development of Wireless Sensor Network sys-
tem to Monitor Parameters Influencing
Freshwater Fishes ”, International Journal
on Computer Science and Engineering, June,
2012.
[3] Joseph K.Butter “An Introduction to Water
Chemistry in Freshwater Aquaculture”
NRAC Fact sheet No.170-1993
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Hayes,Brendan O’Flynn “Design of a Low
Power Wireless Sensor Node for Environmen-
tal Monitoring”ISSC,June,2011.
[5] Dipanjan Bhattacharjee, Sushaban Choud-
hury, Ajay kumar, ”Wireless intelligent smart
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