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Yuanyuan Zhang 1 and Jing Wu 1,2 and Hao Jiang 1,2 and Jianguo Zhou 1 and Xiuhong Li 3 and Laitao Zhu 1 and Zijing Cheng 4
Academic Editor:Kun Mean Hou
1, School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, China
2, Collaborative Innovation Center for Geospatial Technology, No. 129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
3, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, Xin Jie Kou Wai Street, Beijing 100875, China
4, Space Star Technology Ltd., No. 82, Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100086, China
Received 3 July 2015; Revised 25 October 2015; Accepted 11 November 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Agriculture is the foundation of human life. Roughly 37% of earth's land is today employed for agricultural purposes, with about 11% used for growing crops and the reminder for pasture. However, with increasing population throughout the world and the need for increased agricultural production, the improved management of the world's agricultural resources is required. So reliable and timely information about not only the types, but also the quality, quantity, and location of agricultural resources is quite necessary for the countries which take agriculture as main financial source, which can assist in making timely management decisions that affect the outcome of the current crops. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been applied to agriculture for collecting those agricultural data for a long time, such as agricultural irrigation, fertilization, pest control, greenhouse cultivation, and livestock breeding, due to the small size and facile deployment with no need for manual intervention. However, it is quite hard to obtain information of large-scale agriculture for traditional WSN due to the limited energy and deployment area. But it is necessary to monitor and regulate large-scale agriculture for production increase. Satellite sensor network provides information collection and supply in large-scale time and space and enhances future WSN-based applications with various requirements of quality of service (QoS) [1]. But enormous amounts of data transferred on satellite sensor network for the large-scale monitoring may result in link block and network congestion that affects the data reliability with the change...