Internet of things for monitoring grazing animals

Sammanfattning: Swedish agricultural industry is well known for it’s fair animal tending and ecological processes, the high standards comes at a cost of tough strict regulations. Laws were introduced to keep a low level usage of antibiotics and toxic products among the agricultural industry. The though competition from products imported from other countries with much less strict laws puts puts Swedish farmers under pressure and pushes them to keep an extra good eye on their animals in order to avoid sickness and injuries of their animals. This master thesis is focusing on investigating the possibility keep the low usage of antibiotics and maintaining the high level of standards by introducing new technology that can help the farmer to monitor their animals and keep them healthy. The goal of this thesis is to develop a system that monitors grazing animals in the pasture land and helps farmer to detect injuries and diseases at an earlier stage. For the system to be viable and useful for the farmer it has to keep low power consumption and come at an affordable price. The implemented system solution consists of a wireless sensor network that collects data about estimated position of the animal in the pasture land , interaction patterns and ambient sensor data of the environment. The data is then propagated using a opportunistic network protocol. Hardware prototype is tested using simulations, indoor tests, and field tests with cows on a farm in northern Sweden. The work is concluded with evaluations of the prototype based on requirements, scalability and cost