Design and Implementation of an IoT System for Smart Energy Consumption and Smart Irrigation in Tunnel Farming

Abstract

Efficient and cost effective ways of irrigation have emerged as the need of the hour due to limited sweet water resources, especially the countries that are seriously hit by a lack of sweet water reservoirs. The majority of the water is wasted due to inefficient ways of watering plants. In this paper, we propose an intelligent approach for efficient plant irrigation that has a database of daily water needs of a type of plant and decides the amount of water for a plant type on the basis of the current moisture in soil, humidity, and time of the day. This approach not only saves sweet water by efficient utilization, but also supports smart consumption of energy. Our approach employs IoT and a set of sensors to efficiently record plant data and their watering needs and the approach is implemented with a mobile phone application interface that is used to continuously monitor and control the efficient watering system. The results of this study are easy to reproduce as the sensors used are cheap and easy to access. The study discusses in this paper is experimented on small area (such as tunnel farm) but the results of the experiments show that the used approach can be generalized and can be used for large size fields for efficient irrigation. The results of the experiments also outperform the manual approach and the similar approaches for sensor based irrigation systems.

IoT-Based Smart Irrigation Systems: An Overview on the Recent Trends on Sensors and IoT Systems for Irrigation in Precision Agriculture

“…Table 4 lists the cloud platforms that have been used in the reviewed articles. [14,32,41,50,64,72,77,78,88,99,110,113,114,119,121,132,142,[151][152][153]156,169,175,197] Thingspeak [44,56,98,115,118,130,143,146,158,160,166,170,173,191] The rest of the articles where the authors identify the storage system utilize databases. As it can be seen in Figure 28, in 12 articles the information is stored in a database, but the name of the employed database is not specified.…”

“…Other authors have identified the utilized databases. The most utilized one is MySQL [35,46,54,58,67,76,96,110,124,126,144,158] 12 papers, followed by SQL [69,119] [14,32,41,50,64,72,77,78,88,99,110,113,114,119,121,132,142,[151][152][153]156,169,175,197] Thingspeak [44,56,98,115,118,130,143,146,158,160,166,170,…”

“…Papers that measure the most monitored weather parameters. 28,34,35,42,45-49,51,57-59,61-68,71-76,81,84-89,91,93-100,102,103,111,114,115, 117-122,125-127,130,131,133,135,137-140,142-146,148,150,153-160,162-165] Precipitation[30,46,48,50,61,67,76,95,114,119,137,143,157] Luminosity[28,45,48,62,63,[65][66][67]71,72,76,91,99,112,118,119,125,126,129,131,136,140,144,145,154,156,157,159] …”

Smart Agriculture Using IoT Multi-Sensors: A Novel Watering Management System

“…In addition, many agriculture researchers apply WSNs to monitor environmental criteria [2][3][4][5][6]. In addition to standard environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, and precipitation, data such as the ability to control the water level or temperature level are the subject of research in an agricultural environment [10].…”

An IoT Architecture for Water Resource Management in Agroindustrial Environments: A Case Study in Almería (Spain)

“…Moreover, regarding water management in crops, which is the scope of this work, several approaches have been proposed in literature making a proper use of IoT technology for developing smart irrigation systems, some of them based on the use of FIWARE as well. In [27], an IoT system for smart energy consumption and irrigation was presented. The system decides the amount of water required by the crops according to the current moisture in soil and humidity (measured by mean of IoT sensors) and the time of the day.…”