Design and Implementation of a Cloud-based IoT

Scheme for Precision Agriculture

Ahmed Khattab
Ahmed Abdelgawad, Kumar Yelmarthi
EECE Department
College of Science and Engineering
Cairo University
Central Michigan University
Giza, Egypt 12613
Mt Pleasant, MI 48859, USA
[email protected]
{abdel1a, yelam1k}@cmich.edu

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) technology is plethora of applications such as smart-cities, remote healthcare,
currently shaping different aspects of human life. Precision energy and water control, precision agriculture, wildlife
agriculture is one of the paradigms which can use the IoT monitoring, structural and ancient building monitoring, etc.
advantages to optimize the production efficiency and uniformity
across the agriculture fields, optimize the quality of the crops, In this paper, we propose a cloud-based IoT architecture
and minimize the negative environmental impact. In this paper, that is applicable in different precision agriculture applications.
we present an IoT architecture customized for precision The proposed architecture is composed of three layers: a front-
agriculture applications. The proposed three-layer architecture end layer that collects the environmental information and
collects the needed data and relays it to a cloud-based back-end applies the needed agriculture actions; a gateway layer that
where it is processed and analyzed. Feedback actions based on connects the front-end layer to the Internet, and a back-end
the analyzed data can be sent back to the front-end nodes. We layer in which the data storage and processing take place. A
built a prototype of the proposed architecture to demonstrate its prototype of the proposed architecture is built and tested to
performance advantages. illustrate its performance.
KeywordsInternet of Things (IoT); precision agriculture; The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
sensor networks; platform implementation; cloud computing Section II, we review the related literature. The proposed IoT
architecture is presented in Section III. A preliminary set of
I. INTRODUCTION results of a prototype of this architecture is presented in Section
Precision agriculture emerged in the late 1980s with the IV. The paper is concluded in Section V.
matching of grid-based sampling of soil chemical properties
with the newly developed variable-rate application equipment II. RELATED WORK
for fertilizers [1]. Since then, it became the main farming A. High-Level IoT Architectures
management practice worldwide. Precision agricultural
This category represents the related IoT architectures that
services provide the means to (1) fight epidemic diseases by
were proposed in the literature. A classification of generic IoT
applying the appropriate types and amounts of fungicides,
platforms is presented in [2], which also develops a top-level
pesticides and organic fertilizers at the right times, (2) achieve
generic IoT architecture suited for smart city applications
efficient water consumption by watering the plants with only
including precision agriculture. Likewise, [3] presents a
the needed amount of water and the right time, (3) reduce the
functional view of an integrated architecture of data acquisition
harm to the environment since knowing when to spray a
and intelligent control system that can be used in agricultural
pesticide does not only lead to effectively killing harmful pests
facilities such as greenhouse. In [4], the authors present a
but also reduces the use of the pesticide, and (4) produce high-
functional architecture that aims at promoting the development
value agriculture productions by growing non-toxic, safe, and
of facility habitat intelligence monitoring platforms. The
healthy crops.
authors of [5] integrate the recently developed Open IoT
The use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in precision platform that is applicable in a number of use cases with the
agriculture increases the efficiency, productivity and Digital Agriculture (Phenonet) to develop a semantically
profitability of many agricultural production systems [2]-[11]. enhanced agriculture ontology. However, all such related
Real-time environmental information can be remotely gathered works lack actual implementations.
from the agricultural fields and transferred to where it can be
B. Crop Monitoring Platforms
processed to discover problems, store data, and/or take needed
actions. This contrasts with the traditional agricultural Several IoT systems have been developed for monitoring
approaches in which decisions are taken based on some purposes in precision agriculture application [6]-[8]. With the
hypothetical average condition, which may not reflect reality. goal of increasing the crop production, a crop monitoring
system was developed to collect the crop data and use
WSNs are key components the Internet of Things (IoT) in production system through correlation analysis between the
which different pieces of information gathered from almost crop statistical information and agricultural environment
anywhere and anything in the world are accessible through the information [9]. The platforms presented in [10] and [11] and
Internet. The integration of WSNs with IoT resulted in a control functionalities based on the monitored data.

978-1-5090-5721-4/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE 201 ICM 2016

C. Irrigation Control Platforms power with backup batteries. We use the Raspberry Pi 2 single-
Several IoT platforms have been recently developed to board microcontroller that is powered through a 3.7 V Li-Ion
control the water consumption in irrigation. Examples include battery in our front-end nodes.
the simple system developed in [12]. More advanced systems Sensors and Actuators: Different aboveground and
such as the system presented in [13] which allow users to underground sensors are used in precision agriculture to
control the irrigation process via cellular technologies. measure the different environmental attributes needed by a
Likewise, the system presented in [14] uses cellular target application. Examples includes sensors that measure air
technologies to transfer the sensors data to a database system. temperature, air humidity, soil temperature, soil volumetric
The platform proposed in [15] directs the data to a cloud water content, wind speed, wind direction, rain meter, solar
service through HTTP. radiation (infrared, visible, and ultraviolet), and leaf wetness.
These sensors collect the physical information to be
III. PROPOSED CLOUD -BASED AGRICULTURAL IOT communicated to the back-end server. Table I lists the sensors
ARCHITECTURE used in our node prototype. Based on the sensed information,
The proposed cloud-based IoT architecture for agricultural the system is capable of taking the appropriate action such as
applications depicted in Fig. 1 is composed of 3 layers: front- spraying chemicals or fertilizers, watering the plants, etc. This
end, gateway, and cloud back-end. In this section, we discuss is implemented through a set of actuators and mechanical
these three layers and their implementation in detail. controllers that are used to control pumps and sprayers. All
communications between the microcontroller and the
sensors/actuators are done using the I2C protocol.

TABLE I. USED SENSORS

Sensor Model
Air Temperature SHT11
Air Humidity HTU21D
Soil Moisture Sensor SEN0114
Leaf Wetness FC-37
Wind Speed/Direction SEN-08942
Rain Volume SEN-08942

Interfacing Circuits: The different sensors convert the

Fig. 1. Proposed cloud-based IoT architecture for agricultural applications. sensed phenomena (e.g., temperature) into an equivalent
electric voltage or current. However, such electric voltage or
A. Front-end Layer current is still in the analog format. A sensor interfacing
The front-end layer is the physical hardware or the sensing circuitry is needed to convert such analog signals coming from
nodes that are composed of 4 modules: a microcontroller, the the sensors into the corresponding digital format and perform
environmental sensors and actuators, interfacing circuits, and a any further signal conditioning functionality to ensure
wireless communication module as shown in Fig. 2. compatibility with the used microcontroller. Analog-to-Digital
Converters (ADC) are the core component of such interfacing
circuits. We use the 6-bit CA3306 CMOS parallel ADC
designed for low-power applications. On the other hand, the
actuators and mechanical controllers use analog signals as
inputs. Therefore, interfacing circuits that convert the digital
outputs of the microcontroller to the needed analog control
signals are needed. Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC)
interfacing circuits are used for that purpose such as the low-
power MCP4725 DAC used in our system.
Wireless Communication Module: The purpose of this
module is to provide the sensor nodes with the means to
communicate the data to the nearest gateway. Unlike the vast
Fig. 2. Front-end node architecture. majority of related works which use the high power Bluetooth
or cellular technologies, we use the nRF24L01 ultra-low-power
Microcontroller: The microcontroller is responsible for transceiver operating on the 2.4 GHz ISM band which
collecting the data of the different sensors attached to it and significantly reduces the power consumption of our design.
communicating such data to the next layer of the architecture.
B. Gateway Layer
Depending on the application, the microcontroller can be either
battery-powered, self-powered using solar panels, or self- The different front-end nodes deployed in the agricultural
field collect the sensor data and relay it to a gateway. The

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gateway then relays the collected data (possibly after VM (such as memory and disk space) with a minimal
manipulating it) to the cloud servers in the back-end for storage downtime and without data corruption. It is worth noting that if
and extensive data analysis. The gateway layer also forwards the agriculture system requirement exceeds the available
requests from the back-end to the actuators in the nodes. Each hardware resources, the implemented VM can be easily moved
gateway can be connected to up to 6 front-end nodes through to a dedicated cloud hosting platform such as an EC2 instance
nRF24L01 transceivers such as those used in the front-end on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
nodes. The gateway is also implemented using Raspberry Pi 2
microcontroller. Being equipped with a 900 MHz quad-core IV. PROTOTYPE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
ARM cortex-A7 CPU and 1 GB RAM, such a microcontroller A prototype of the proposed architecture for IoT precision
provides the needed processing power and storage that ensure agriculture applications has been implemented for a proof of
that all the capture sensor data is relayed to the cloud server for concept to evaluate the proposed IoT transducer framework.
analysis. A miniature IEEE 802.11b/g/n (WiFi) module is used Three front-end nodes equipped with sensors listed in Table I
to connect the gateway to the remote back-end. The used were used. These three front-end nodes are deployed outdoors
module is interfaced to the microcontroller using a standard in the Central Michigan University (CMU) campus. The nodes
TCP/IP interface. The data rate of this module is 150 Mbps. connect to a single gateway using nRF24L01 wireless
C. Back-end Layer interfaces. The gateway connects to the Internet, and hence to
the back-end cloud server, using the WiFi technology. The
The back-end is responsible for facilitating the end-users' gateway collects data from the three front-end nodes and
ability of accessing the sensed data. This is achieved by performs abstract data analysis for immediate feedback (if
implementing several services including, but not limited to, necessary), and transmits the raw data to the cloud for detailed
data storage, data analytics, and data visualization in addition data analytics. The back-end cloud server receives and stores
to providing an appropriate application program interface the data received from the cloud server, performs data
(API) and software tools through which the end-user can analytics, and creates visual illustrations for easier data
access the data. In our proposed architecture, we implement the interpretation.
back-end layer via the cloud-based server shown in Fig. 3.
A. Wind Speed and Dirction
First, we collect the wind speed and direction data. For the
wind speed data, the rotation of the sensor is converted into
velocity measured in Miles Per Hour (MPH). The used SEN-
08942 sensor gives different voltage values for different
directions. The sensor used in the prototype gives up to 16
different directions. Fig. 4 depicts the wind speed collected
over a 200 minutes window. This figure shows the variations
of the wind speed by the minute over the observation window.
Different granularities can be obtained using our cloud server.
We omit the wind direction results for space considerations.

Fig. 3. Cloud server architecture.

The back-end cloud server has a large database at its core

that can accommodate huge amount of data relayed through the
gateway layer from the front-end node. The database is
interfaced to a wide set of data analysis algorithms and APIs
such as Google Sheets for data visualization. Data can be
accessed through the Internet using dynamic webpages as
shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 4. Wind speed recorderd over a 200-minute window.
In our implementation of the cloud server, both Apache and
MySQL run on the same virtual machine (VM) running B. Rain Volum
Ubuntu 14.04. This VM is just one of the many VMs that Next, we present the results of the rain meter and the
constitute a larger VSphere implementation. The VSphere moisture sensors. We show such data in Fig. 5 for a 200
control panel is used to increase the resource allocation of the minutes window in which the rain existed only in the first 23

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minutes. Fig. 5 shows the gradual decrease in the rain volume implementation details. We have built a prototype to illustrate
before it stops. Meanwhile, the moisture slightly increased the different performance aspects of the proposed architecture.
after the rain stopped. Such data can be used in predicting the The preliminary performance evaluation results have
evolution of plan diseases. demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed architecture
despite its simplicity. This makes the proposed architecture a
good candidate for implementing a wide set of precision
agriculture systems. Our future work will include how to
secure the access of the data and will develop a mobile
application that allows access of the data on handheld devices.
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Rain Fall(inches)

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