The IMDEA Networks team consisting of Associate Professor Domenico Giustiniano, PhD students Dayrene Frómeta, Javier Talavante and intern Steven Jesús Paz have started a collaboration with the “Soil and Water Quality in the Environment” (SWQ) research group of IMDEA Water, in a further demonstration that IMDEA institutes establish synergies with each other by finding common ground in their research.
The objective of the collaboration is to use the greenhouse facilities of the IMDEA Water Institute to evaluate in a real environment the communication performance of the precision agriculture monitoring system designed in the PerSys research group at IMDEA Networks (led by Domenico Giustiniano). The main components of the monitoring system are battery-free IoT devices deployed inside the greenhouse to measure environmental parameters.

The idea is to compare the accuracy of their system, which allows deploying a denser sensor network, with the control system of the greenhouse that includes only one sensor placed at the center of the facility. The first group of experiments is focusing on evaluating the communication performance of the system in the new scenario and, for this purpose, the following communication technologies are being used: WiFi, LiFi and radio frequency (RF) backscatter.

Also, researchers plan to study the possibility of integrating new sensors in the IoT device to measure parameters of interest to IMDEA Water researchers (belonging to the SWQ research group led by Prof. Irene de Bustamante), such as the soil moisture. Although a soil moisture sensor has been integrated into its IoT tag in the past, it cannot be used for IMDEA Water experiments because the sensing probe of the sensor is made of plastic, which could contaminate the soil. Therefore, the IMDEA Networks team will study the integration of soil moisture sensors into our IoT tag with a sensing probe made of non-contaminating materials.

“This collaboration opportunity with IMDEA Water will also support the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for our Startup LiFi4Food”, concludes Frómeta.