Integration of Agricultural Wireless Sensor Networks to Web-of-Things Through an Edge-Computing-Enriched WSNs/WoT Gateway

Abstract

To connect agricultural wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to web services and applications, the agricultural WSNs/WoT gateway is empowered with local data management and network maintenance functions for downstream WSNs in addition to traditional upstream data collection. This work demonstrates a low-cost, highly scalable, rapidly deployable web of things (WoT) gateway with edge computing capabilities. First, an agricultural WSNs/WoT topology is architected, connecting a ZigBee WSNs to the Web for remote monitoring the local environmental and agronomical information, and simultaneously for managing the solar-powered WSNs for a prolonged lifespan according to the instant data scrawled from the cloud. Second, a WSNs/WoT gateway is designed with the hardware platform Raspberry Pi 3, which serves multiple needs for bidirectional information exchange and local WSNs management. Finally, experimentation demonstrates the proposed hardware platform and architecture can perform edge computing, and efficiently realize the up and down transmission and distribution of data stream.