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An IoT Based Architecture for Smart Farming

Article in International Journal of Control and Automation · December 2019

DOI: 10.33832/ijca.2019.12.9.04

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 International Journal of Control and Automation
Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019), pp.31-40
http//dx.doi.org/10.33832/ijca.2019.12.9.04

AN IOT BASED ARCHITECTURE FOR SMART

FARMING
^

D. S. Bhupal Naik1, V Ramakrishna Sajja2, P Jhansi Lakshmi3 and Venkatesulu D4

1, 2, 3, 4
Department of Computer Science& Engineering, Vignan’s Foundation for
Science, Technology & Research, India
1
[email protected], [email protected],
3
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract— With the rapid development of the world population, large area of
land is utilized to develop housing and the ability of producing food is reduced.
Farming has become crucial in present trend and keeps food on the tables. Farming
with IOT helps in mitigating the shortage of food by demanding the existing land for
stronger utilization at minimum cost. Smart farming is a notion that quickly snaps
on the agricultural field. This offers an automated farming techniques, useful data
collection and high-rigor crop control. Sophisticated sensor based architecture is
proposed to monitor the conditions of the farms by using sensors and the
information extracted from these sensors is stored on the internet. This stored
information is obtained and evaluated to forecast the condition of farms, according
to a period of time. Based on this evaluation, the necessary improvements can be
made with better farming conditions in future.

Keywords— IOT, Sensors, Smart farming, Agriculture, Food, Modem, Micro

controller

1. INTRODUCTION
In India, farming is the only source that generates revenue for the agriculture
community. Two-thirds of our population is based on farming for a livelihood. So for this
reason, farming has become the back bone of Indian economy [1, 2]. Due to many
problems, farmer suicides are leading into a large number across India because of the
problems are faced as insufficient rainfall, irregular monsoons. These are not responsible
and can be set directions to deliver by technology. At the right time, some of the
problems can be solved by giving proper advices to the farmers. To harvest crops, some
of the requirements like fertilizers, labors, pesticides, seeds and water are necessary.
Based on the water availability, the main task of a farmer is to raise the capital. When
they are unable to raise the capital in their own path, they depend on other sources like
banks and some financial organizations. At this situation, the farmer depends on the crop
for crediting the payments that are taken from banks and financial organizations. This
may create very tough conditions if the crop fails. And sometimes, this may results
pushing the farmer into some of the critical situations and causes relentless stress [3, 5].
This type of crop failures can be avoided and some of the preventions are to be noticed
with the available resources before dumping. There is only way to address these types of
problems and increase the quality and quantity of crop production is by utilizing the IoT
sensing technology. Farming with IOT helps in mitigating the shortage of food by
demanding the existing land for stronger utilization at minimum cost. This technology

^
Received: May 23, 2019
Reviewed: August 21, 2019
Accepted: September 9, 2019

ISSN: 2207-6387 IJCA

Copyright ⓒ 2019 NADIA
International Journal of Control and Automation
Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

makes crops to be connected through the smart farming. IoT sensors in the farms are
more capable of providing information to farmers about crops and used for monitoring
the health of crops in earlier stages [6], [8].
Section - II describes the related work carried out by various researchers, detailed
explanation of IOT & Smart farming is given in Section-III and Section-IV, respectively,
Section-V explains the drivers and barriers raised during their integration and our
perception about solutions which is followed by Conclusion.

2. RELATED WORK
C. Perera, A. Zaslavsky, C. Liu, M. Compton, P. Christen and D. Georgakopoulos [7]
led a study about enabling IOT and its applications in industries by a survey. The SOA
models of IOT were introduced and discussed about their fundamental technologies. They
also introduced some key applications by analyzing the challenges and future trends
related to IOT. They mainly concentrated on the industrial applications and focused on
the challenges and research opportunities which are possible for future researchers.
Nicoleta-Cristina Gaitan, Vasile Gheorghita Gaitan, Ioan Ungurean [4] surveyed on
software architectures on IoT. From the proposed architectures the data are distributed by
including a middleware layer in the internet. These architectures meet the requirements
for IoT systems by including some existing technologies. M.U. Farooq, Muhammad
Waseem, Sadia Mazhar, Anjum Khairi, Talha Kamal led study about emerging large
scale of IoT technologies into networking used for monitoring the environment by
embedding objects around us. They also discussed about IoT vision and highlighted
various technologies and few issues related to those technologies.
N. Shashwathi, Priyam Borkotoky, Suhas K [16] proposed a set of farmer friendly
technology services between the expertise of Agra-scientists and farmers. They also
explain the benefits about taking the advice of agricultural experts for Chikku farm in
Bangalore. This project has been spread across three years. In the first year, they have
gathered the requirements and developed a model. In the second phase, some of the
farmer friendly services are deployed on the IBM cloud platform using web and mobile
clients.
Vidya Kumbhar [12] led a study on IT for Sustainable Agricultural Development in
India. He developed this model to help farmers to increase their food productivity, which
leads to their economic growth. The model was developed to track all types of
information about farmers related to crops.

3. INTERNET OF THINGS
The term, IoT was introduced by the British pioneer Kevin Ashton in the year 1998 to
describe a system with large number of objects or sensors that would be connected to the
internet through communications to provide some services. In present days, IoT became
more popular for characterizing the scenarios like connectivity and computing capability
that extends to different objects and everyday items. The “thing” in IoT refers to any of
the communicating or non-communicating object on earth [9, 10]. This object represents
both physical entities and digital entities by performing some computational tasks for
people. IoT supports the interaction between "things" and allows more-complex
structures by developing distributed applications and distributed computing. The working
of IoT is done on the basis of Machine–to-Machine (M2M) communication and this
M2M is defined for communicating between two machines without the involving
manpower. Even non-connected entities in IOT can turn as IOT components [11, 13].
This technology sometimes understood as being identical with smart systems such as
smart homes, smart enterprises, smart wearable, smart city and smart environment. The
development of the current Internet yields information from the sensing environment and

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Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

interacts with the physical world by utilizing existing Internet standards for providing
services like communication, data transfer and applications.

Any
One

Any Any
Where Context
Internet
of
Things
Any Any
Thing Service

Any
Path

Fig. 1 Definition of IoT

4. SMART FARMING
The main goal of this Smart Farming is to optimize the harvesting land per unit by
using modern methods to achieve best in terms of quality, quantity and financial return.
The term smart farming is also known as Precision Farming which uses a wide range of
technologies, including GPS services, sensors and etc. These technologies are very much
required in agriculture sector includes with climate forecasting, robotics, science based
solutions, environmental controls and etc. An M2M system is necessary to analyze the
data and initiates the responses to the information received [14, 15]. In this perspective of
the Machine-to-Machine communication system, this technology around it vision enables
some key transformations of the agriculture towards the vision of smart farming. The
impact of this technology in farming delivers the connectivity between the sensors and
communication systems and these sensors spreads in different areas like food traceability,
land management and environmental monitoring [17, 18]. The intricacy of smart farming
can reflect the agricultural ecosystem in the following ways.

Wireless Services: The wireless services include a collection of wireless sensor devices
used to monitor the physical and environmental conditions [19].

Machines and Equipments: The machines are the elements used to direct the work in
agriculture in improving the production and farming techniques. The most widely used
machinery in agriculture work fields are Tractors, combines and etc. The equipments in
the field of agriculture are designed to open furrows in the earth [20, 21]. The various
types of equipments are ploughs, fence, blade, handlebar and etc.

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Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

Fig. 2 Architecture for Smart Farming Ecosystem

End Users: The end users in smart farming are the growers and managers at the back
office systems. They are also considered as a farmer’s co-operatives which can help
smaller farmers with advice and funding.

Cost: In spite of larger farms, the cost would be a major problem. The factors like soil-
mapping, fertilizer applications, machinery, weather data generates vast quantities of
information. This information is collected by farm offices by these factors are in the field
of farming.

Stakeholders: Stakeholders role in agriculture is broad. The range of these stakeholders

starts from large business fields like finance, engineering, retailers to industry are well
expertise in farming with the contribution of small suppliers.

Influencers: Influencers plays an important role in word-of-mouth marketing in the field

of agriculture. The benefits of influence marketing are numerous. Partnering with an
influencer can be a cost effective form of high-quality content with built in distribution.

The working of smart devices in farming allows farmers to apply amount of resources
like water, fertilizers, etc.… at the right time and right place in right time. This type of
farming is a priceless tool for composing chemicals in soil. This system operates many
machines and equipments very smartly and collects the data based on these equipments
from the field by configuring the problems when they are detected. The devices in this
field will be user friendly and helps the farmers to plan irrigation and more activities
based on environmental and soil conditions. The parameters like temperature, humidity,
pH value and soil moisture can be monitored by these device controllers and can be
informed through some graphical representations. The devices can be configured by
farmers for receiving important alerts from the field parameters in the form of SMS
messages in his mobile through programming. In this way, most of the situations can be
monitored and controlled in agriculture field by using some remotely operated devices.

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The Smart devices in the agriculture field consist of some key features. They are as
follows:
 Different agricultural parameters like Temperature, Wind, Humidity, and
Moisture can be controlled and monitored by using sensors.
 Generates and Schedules a plan for irrigation and fertilization.
 Data can be obtained through wireless speckles.
 Provides external memory interface for the purpose of feeding and desertification.
 Provides awareness to the farmers by alerting while he is away from the field.
 Controls the equipments in the field through sensor devices like mobile phones,
Tablets, computers etc.

Solar Panel Sensors

BST Server

Micro Modem Internet

Controller

IOT Device USB

Power supply Camera Lights

Fig. 3 Architecture of Smart Farming System

The above figure represents the architecture of the smart farming system in the
agriculture. The block diagram consists of following:

1. Solar Panel acts as a power source and offers an opportunity to stabilize the
energy cost to the farmers. These solar panels are of three types namely:

a. Grid solar: This reduces the final cost for the power utilization for the home
and business. The energy generated from the sun is utilized by this panel and
earns the credits which are used further.
b. Hybrid solar: These are used as power bank to the systems which are used for
backup purpose. The power is supplied to the grid via battery bank in the
event of power of outage.
c. Off-grid solar: These type of solar panels are independently used for a remote
location and are limited.

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International Journal of Control and Automation
Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

2. Sensors: The sensors form a network with each other. A master sensor can act as
a gateway by collecting the sensor readings to the internet using mobile
connectivity. This installation requires any of the SIM cards to connect to the
internet. Node sensor is also having similar functionality as master sensor [22],
[23]. Node sensor can also acts as a gateway by conducting the data to the
internet where as master sensor pushes data directly to the internet. Most often,
spectral sensors are used to examine the growth of plants in soils with different
levels of nutrients.

3. Base Station: In the agriculture field, Base station acts as a piece of equipment
with wireless communication between user and a network.

4. Microcontroller: The Microcontroller plays a major role in field of agriculture

by transferring the information about the motors in the farm. When the motor is
turned ON by the controller then the pumping functionality of the water from the
ground is activated. In the other case, it constantly monitors the dizitized
parameters of the various sensors and verifies those parameters with some
predefined threshold values.

5. Server: This can act as a centralized system to store and share data among farmer
and internet.

6. Modem: This can be used as a wireless device for connectivity to transfer the
data between source to destination. The source and destination in the farm may
be office and farmer, vehicle and vehicle and etc.

7. Internet: This is a global computer network that provides a variety of

information and communication facilities.

8. IOT Device: This may be any of the smart devices.

9. USB: It can be a flash drive that can act as portable storage device.

10. Power: It is one of the major source of energy used for irrigation and controlling
the motors and lights in the farming.

11. Camera: The role of camera in the field of agriculture plays a vital role. The key
uses of these cameras are:

 Identification of the intruders

 Protect the water supplies
 Prevent break-ins
 Vehicle Tracking
 Employee monitoring

12. Lights: A popular light source with eco-friendly features is LED. This LED is
good for growth of plants by improving the life time and can have huge business
opportunities by maintaining the quality. To maintain the proper growth of plants
in the farms, LED screens are to be installed to provide the enough light for
germination.

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 International Journal of Control and Automation
Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

The applications in the area of smart farming are complicated. The structure of this
smart farming is described in the following figure.

Fig. 4 Applications from Smart Farming

The following steps describe the Drivers and Barriers in the adoption of Smart
Farming into agriculture.

The Drivers are:

 To increase efficiency there should be a need to reduce waste.
 The immediate response is needed when there is a change in climate.
 Assistance is needed in a farming area from public and projects.
 Soil erosion is to be addressed before thorough farming.
 Many industries use an M2M based system for monitoring and Tracking
purposes.
 Cost of smart devices like sensors and their connectivity must be reduced.

The Barriers are:

 Investments on device installations in a farm cannot be returned once they have
been directed.
 Many issues like weather and political may create several problems by inheriting
in the industry.
 Based on data collected from the owner, many queries cannot be resolved.
 Lack of Wireless and broadband facilities in Rural areas.
 No standard development in sensor networks.
 No maturity in Specialist agricultural software’s.

5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we discussed about farming with IoT for providing many useful services
to the farmers in society in future. Many of the smart applications can be developed by
the IOT and vastly utilized by users. The working of smart devices in farming allows
farmers to apply amount of many resources at right time and right place in right time.
This type of farming is having less cost. This system operates many machines and
equipments very smartly and collects the data based on these equipments from the field
by configuring the problems when they are detected. Farming with IOT helps in
mitigating the shortage of food by demanding the existing land for stronger utilization at

Copyright © 2019 NADIA 37

International Journal of Control and Automation
Vol. 12, No. 9 (2019)

minimum cost. Smart farming is a notion that quickly snaps on the agricultural field. This
offers automated farming techniques, useful data collection and high-rigor crop control.
The main goal of this Smart Farming is to optimize the harvesting land per unit by using
modern methods to achieve best in terms of quality, quantity and financial return. Finally,
some of the probable solutions are examined by approaching some related research
initiatives.

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