International Journal of Control and Automation Vol. 8, No. 1 (2015), pp. 243-250 http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijca.2015.8.1.22 ISSN: 2005-4297 IJCA Copyright ⓒ 2015 SERSC Development of an Effective Routing Protocol for Cluster Based Wireless Sensor Network for Soil Moisture Deficit Monitoring Kamlendu Kumar Pandey and Dr. S.V. Patel MSc IT Programme, Dept of Computer Science Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat kamlendup@gmail.com, patelsv@gmail.com Abstract The use of wireless sensor networks in agriculture is anticipated to revolutionalise its operational mechanism. Many activities like moisture deficit monitoring, crop yield estimation and soil erosion can be automated using sensors. However, we need to develop deployment strategies, routing schemes appropriate for such applications. This paper focuses on special case of irrigated agriculture in gravity and pressurised irrigation. We have formulated a deployment strategy and developed an efficient routing protocol LATHAR (Location aware Threshold Based Hierarchical and Adaptive Routing) for transmitting the data packets from sensor node to the access point. The protocol has been tested on simulation model developed in ns2 simulator and it has been found to perform best in almost all the matrices used to evaluate the performance of WSN. Keywords: We Wireless Sensor Networks, Routing Protocol, irrigation 1. Introduction The wireless sensor networks is one the products which are seen as the next-gen alternative to solve problems of redundant nature. With the advancements and maturity of this technology, the world is looking towards it to solve many existing problems like environmental monitoring, vehicle tracking, defense surveillance, early warning system for natural disasters, flood control, irrigation etc. It has got a very promising use in controlled irrigation systems. The efficiency of any controlled irrigation system depends on the actual demand of water and supply to replenish the demand, there has been always a gap between them due to inaccuracy in predicting the exact demand. The soil moisture sensor when interfaced with sensor mote was deployed as sensor node to sense the soil moisture. Deciding sensor topology and routing the sensed data was a major issue. After careful study of all the protocols it was decided to go for a new protocol. The new protocol was developed in a simulated environment and was tested for the crucial parameters with all other protocols. This paper is organized as The rest of the paper is organised as follows 2) Related Work 3) WSN Topology and deployment of sensors 4) LATHAR – New Protocol development 5) Simulation 6) Result 7)Conclusion 2. Related Work Many routing protocols have been used and conceptualized in field of wireless sensor networks[1]. These routing protocols are mainly classified based on Data Centric approach, Hierarchical Approach, Location based approach, Network and QoS flow based