The Development of a Wireless Sensor Network Fence for Tracking and Monitoring Beef Cattle in a Free Ranch in a Large Open Space

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop a wireless sensor network fence system
for tracking and monitoring beef cattle in a free ranch in a surrounding area of a wireless
sensor network fence. The fence helps tracking and monitoring the beef cattle to stay
within the defined area by using the wireless sensor network to send identities of a sensor
node to a base station. The sensor node firstly communicates to every reference node
nearby to find distance between the nodes. Then it sends all the data to the base station
in order to analyze the current area of the beef cattle by considering the distance value
from the sensor nodes of each beef cattle if they are on any reference nodes. This serves
to approximately estimate the location of the beef cattle. After the process of location
estimation is finished, all data will be stored in a database and shown on a web browser.
In functional testing of the wireless sensor network fence at a real location, it was found
that the identity display and the location estimation of beef cattle in a surrounding area of
a wireless sensor network fence were accurate. The success rate was 63.40 percent when
the time of packet data transmission was adjusted to a minimum. The value increased
more when the time of transferring data packet of a source node increased as well.