Internet of Things Smart Farming Architecture for Agricultural Automation

Abstract

With the increase of global demand for food and with the adoption of the trends of local sourcing and locally grown produce, the need for gardening and farming automation solutions ranging from industrial to home level has been on the rise. In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) farming control system based on the concept of Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) that provides ideal growing conditions for user-defined crops. This is achieved by utilizing the information provided by a series of sensors monitoring the environmental (temperature, humidity, UV, etc.) and soil (moisture, nutrients, etc.) conditions to control the deployed actuators. To allow a wide range of deployment sizes, we use a two-stage system that combines a series of low-power sensor and actuator nodes with a communication and data processing gateway. The low-power microcontroller reads the data from the sensors and sends them to the data processing gateway, which then calculates the optimal actuator changes required to achieve the desired status. These changes are then feedbacked to the low-power microcontroller which actuates the control devices. The communication between the devices is performed via a bespoke LoRa-based communication protocol optimized for minimal overhead, flexibility, and guaranteed data delivery. This is presented to the user via a website to view the configuration of the system and the observation of the past and present environmental, soil, and actuator status of the system.