UC Santa Cruz

As greenhouses and other forms of protected agriculture modernize their systems and adopt data-driven techniques in reaction to climate change, wireless agricultural sensing is rapidly becoming an emergent area of research. Due to high energy and resource consumption in greenhouses, low-power systems capable of autonomous greenhouse control will be critical for next-gen greenhouses in order to help address food security and climate resilience. To fill this gap, I develop an ultra-low power wireless communication technique that can be utilized for precision agriculture in greenhouses. The proposed solution uses a chirp spread spectrum (CSS) based visible light communication (VLC) downlink that is capable communicating 2 meters using agricultural grow light light emitting diodes (LEDs). VLC coupled with the high noise resilience of CSS permits the transmission of data even under high irradiance conditions such as greenhouses, thereby enabling locationally-relevant sensor placement. In this thesis, in addition to describing the CSS VLC downlink, I also present performance results obtained through simulation experiments as well as experiments with the current CSS VLC prototype.