Batteryless Sensor System for Breakage Detection in Electric Fence

Abstract

The human-elephant conflict is an ongoing tragedy in the everyday life of rural villagers and farmers in many parts of Sri Lanka. Approximately 80 people and 200 elephants die every year due to the fights between them, when elephants enter the farm lands and human habitats in search of food and water [10]. While many illegal methods are in use to prevent elephants from entering human habitats, such as poisoning and shooting them, the only viable solution that has been tried so far is electric fencing. Maintaining these fences is not an easy task. Locating breakages in these fences is a critical challenge. Electric fences installed in Sri Lanka are 2-40 km in length [2]. At present, breakages are located by walking along the fence and inspecting it. This requires a considerable amount of manpower and as a consequence, the breakages are occasionally left unattended, which allows the elephants to cross over and roam into nearby villages. In this dissertation, a novel approach is proposed to address the problem of locating breakages in electric fences. For this, cheap batteryless nodes will be setup along the fence which detect the breakages in fence and communicate wirelessly to a base station. This focuses on two main aspects, one is to make batteryless energy efficient low cost nodes and second is to design an energy efficient wireless communication protocol to be installed in the designed nodes. With this novel idea we can detect breakages in electric fences automatically without manpower. Wildlife officers fixes breakages during day-time since night-time is dangerous. Therefore if a breakage happens in the electric fence it is detected and the location of the breakage will be reported to the authority within a day and wildlife officers can look into that quickly.