Agricultural remote monitoring systems based on web-server-em bedded technology and CDMA service

Agricultural remote monitoring systems based on web-server-embedded technology and mobile telecommunication will become a core node technology in sensing network construction for agriculture production in China. This is now possible because of the very many mobile phone users and the widespread availability of digital services in this country. Soil, environmental, and crop information monitoring are important in production management and in decision-making in precision agriculture. The characteristics of reliability, security and cheapness are essential in the monitoring of agricultural information. Three improved field monitoring servers (FMS) using code division multiple access (CDMA) services combined with IPsec-based virtual private network (VPN) functions were installed in two commercial rice fields in Shanghai and in one experimental maize field in Beijing and a remote wireless sensing network was constructed. In a 3-year trial, this remote monitoring system with ubiquitous node infrastructure was shown to be useful and cost-effective for collecting soil, environmental and crop information remotely for precision agriculture.