were the first commercial solution and time has
become much more valuable to people over the last
decade. In Norway there is not much money in
sheep farming, therefore many farmers keep sheep
as a hobby. They have money from their other job,
but not much spare time. They are therefore willing
to spend some of that money to save time on their
sheep farming hobby. Our goal for this project was
to see if we could improve GSM coverage, cost or
battery life of sheep tracking networks. Our main
focus has been on GSM coverage as this is the most
pressing issue. To improve the current solution we
have created a new sheep tracking algorithm which
combines techniques for multi-hop routing and
clustered networks. This algorithm has then been
compared with Telespor using a simulator based on
real sheep data collected by a sheep farmer with 470
sheep.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 lists
related work with a special focus on the current
Telespor solution. Section 3 covers our new sheep
tracking algorithm. Section 4 details the sheep data
the simulation was based on, as well as the metrics
we have used and the results we achieved. Section 5
consist of a discussion of the new algorithm versus
Telespor. Section 6 concludes this paper.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 Animal Tracking
Animal tracking and habitat monitoring has received
a lot of research attention. In Oxford, a team of
scientists have been monitoring badger behaviour
(Dyo et al., 2010). They equipped the badgers with
magnets to track them inside their burrows. Sensors
above ground measured disturbance in magnetic
fields caused by the badger magnets. Researchers in
Maine (Polastre et al., 2004) applied wireless sensor
networks techniques when they monitored the
behaviour of seabirds on a remote island. They
installed sensor nodes in the bird nests and returned
data via a central base station placed on the island.
This technique is a static version of the technique
applied in the algorithm described in this paper.
In (Stølsmark and Tøssebro, SENSORCOMM
2012), we presented an algorithm for sheep tracking.
This algorithm has a cluster-based approach
allowing some of the sheep to carry cheaper nodes
and still report their location through full feature
nodes. They found that this solution reduced the
average energy consumption of the sheep nodes
since only the leader in a cluster needed to use GPS.
This approach is also used in the algorithm
presented in this paper. In our system, we improve
on the cluster-based approach by adding a multi-hop
position retrieval method to extend GSM coverage.
This multi-hop approach is inspired by the
promising results we achieved in (Stølsmark and
Tøssebro, ECUMICT 2012). We also studied the
possibility of using RSSI triangulation as an
alternative way to locate sheep (Stølsmark and
Tøssebro, SENSORNETS 2012). The results were
disappointing and that is the reason we have chosen
not to pursuit this approach in our sheep tracking
algorithm.
2.2 Telespor
Telespor is the current market leading sheep tracking
solution. In the Telespor system, the sheep carry
nodes with GPS and GSM-capabilities. The nodes
find their own position using GPS and report this
position to the Telespor server via the GSM
network. The sheep farmer can then watch the
location of their sheep on a web application.
Through this application, the farmer also has access
to advanced features such as adjusting the update
interval. Lately Telespor has added a cheaper short
(a few meters) range lamb node. This node reports
via the sheep node and has no GPS or GSM
functionality. The purpose of the lamb node is to let
the farmer know that lambs are with their sheep
mothers. Fig. 1 illustrates the Telespor system. In
step 1 the sheep node receives a GPS position from
the GPS satellites. In step 2 the node sends that
position to the Telespor server via the GSM
network.
2.2.1 Problems with the Telespor Solution
The Telespor system is far from perfect. In a
research project (Haugset and Nossum, 2010)
farmers tested the system during a summer. The
biggest problem was the lack of GSM coverage as
the sheep were grazing in rural mountainous areas.
A few of the farmers reported that sheep could be
outside GSM coverage for weeks at a time. Another
issue is with the cost of the units. One full GPRS
node costs approximately € 200. This is so
expensive that few farmers take the cost of
equipping all their sheep with tracking units. They
put them on a few sheep instead and hope they will
be representative for the rest of the flock. This helps
in locating part of the flock but the problem of
finding the last few sheep persists. Battery life could
also be improved. The longer the battery life, the
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