Intelligent Greenhouse - IoT Enabled Resource Management for Sustainable Crop Production in Sultanate of Oman

Abstract

Providing food has always been a great challenge for the Omani people who have developed different methods to develop this industry starting from making Falaj networks and agricultural terraces in the mountains. Agriculture is one of the most important challenges for humankind, due to the increase of population and changes in environment. Soil salinization, water salinity level and high temperatures are the biggest challenges in agriculture in Oman in the last 20 years. The intelligent Greenhouse is a device that is used to control irrigation, ventilation, lightening using a microcontroller. This system will grant saving around 1000 litres of water per year for a single plant such as a cucumber and uses the solar energy to save about 98% of the electricity price needed to operate the system. Intelligent Greenhouse is research that is based on the internet of thing which is eventually granted and utilize the technology in the farming techniques to minimize the waste of water and power. First, the system implementation is based on using the Microcontroller to sense and control the whole system components. Secondly, it provides readable values of temperature, humidity, water level and light intensity that are transported over network to cloud website with proper authentication configuration. Finally, the system will control the functionality of ventilation, irrigation and lightening upon the pre-configured conditions with the possibility of modifying these values remotely in a handy way for non-programmer users upon the requirement.