An Architectural Framework Proposal for IoT Driven Agriculture

Abstract

The Internet of Things is paving the way for the transition into the fourth industrial revolution with the mad rush of connecting physical devices and systems to the internet. IoT is a promising technology to drive the agricultural industry, which is the backbone for sustainable development especially in developing countries like those in Africa that are experiencing rapid population growth, stressed natural resources, reduced agricultural productivity due to climate change, and massive food wastage. In this paper, we assessed challenges in the adoption of IoT in developing countries in agriculture. We propose a cost effective, energy efficient, secure, reliable and heterogeneous (independent of the IoT protocol) three layer architecture for IoT driven agriculture. The first layer consists of IoT devices and it is made up of IoT driven agriculture systems such as smart poultry, smart irrigation, theft detection, pest detection, crop monitoring, food preservation, and food supply chain systems. The IoT devices are connected to the gateways by low power LoRaWAN network. The gateways and local processing servers co-located with the gateways create the second layer. The cloud layer is the third layer, which exploits the open source FIWARE platform to provide a set of public and free-to-use API specifications that come along with open source reference implementations.

More than two decades of research on IoT in agriculture: a systematic literature review

“…the cost of sensor equipment (Jaisankar et al, 2020), the network layer, e.g. expensive connectivity (Kuaban et al, 2019), the analytics and the application layers, e.g. cost of cloud services (Villa-Henriksen et al, 2020).…”

“…IoT equipment such as sensors are either not at all available for sale (Kour and Arora, 2020) or not yet mature enough (Villa-Henriksen et al, 2020) to support a reliable service for agriculture. Additionally, there is a further lack of technical skills and expertise reported in the context of developing countries to implement and support the IoT solution on the ground (Kuaban et al, 2019). Other studies report a lack of availability of high-quality and open data (e.g.…”

“…Energy consumption is confirmed as a challenge, regardless of the region and subsector of agriculture by the studies and highlighted particularly in the context of outdoor agriculture (Ruan et al, 2019). Several battery-powered wireless sensors and network nodes must be deployed to cover large scale open fields, which increases cost of energy (Kuaban et al, 2019) and efforts for the maintenance (Shi et al, 2019). There is often a trade-off between energy and other barriers related to cost, connectivity, computing, storage and scalability under design parameters.…”

“…With an expected 24 billion connected devices in 2025 (GSMA Intelligence, 2021), IoT is poised to become the next big "thing" after the advent of computers, Internet and smartphones, leading to the fourth industrial revolution (Kuaban et al, 2019). While the majority of IoT efforts are found within the sectors of early adopters such as manufacturing (Barenkamp, 2020), the share of agriculture remains relatively modest with only 4%, as compared to manufacturing with 22% (IoT Analytics, 2020).…”

IoT based Agriculture (IoTA): Architecture, Cyber Attack, Cyber Crime and Digital Forensics Challenges

“…Hence, the concept of fog layer overcomes the drawback like high latency because of real time control and mitigates security risk about data transmission as the Internet were acted as a backbone. Thus, the compromisation of the Internet will lead to complete obstruction IoTA system [30].…”