Title: Contribución a las redes de sensores inalámbricas. Estudio e implementación de soluciones hardware para agricultura de precisión.
Abstract: Water and food are the main resources that meet the needs of human beings.Agriculture provides most of the food but it also consumes most of the Earth"s available fresh water.In arid and semiarid regions, as Southern Spain, the water supply is an important factor that considerably affects agriculture.Development of innovative irrigation systems that efficiently use water is a high priority.In these regions, farmers must irrigate their crops efficiently; therefore, they must find new solutions and methods that improve the irrigation programming systems, taking into account not only the state of the soil and the plants but also information relating to the climate.All these data must be properly interpreted to decide the most suitable actions to carry out.Precision Agriculture is a set of techniques that provide a suitable solution to these problems because it aims to optimize field-level management with regard to crop science by matching farming practices more closely to crop needs.Economic advantages are also obtained by boosting competitiveness through more efficient practices (e.g.better management of water usage and costs).On the other hand, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT"s) are used to acquire information about the crop needs.Precision Agriculture techniques use this information to achieve the proposed objectives, in particular, intensive monitoring of crops, data analysis, decision making and application of control actions.