A Comparative Analysis on Smart Farming Techniques using Internet of Things (IoT)

Author Name(s): Pramod Mathew Jacob, Prasanna M, Parveen Sultana H
Author Email: pramod3mj@gmail.com

Abstract

Agriculture is considered as one of the major sources in maintaining a nation’s GDP. Most of the developing countries and under developed countries are relying on cultivation to improve their economic wealth. In this modern technology era, technology can play a tremendous role in the agriculture sector. The advanced technology has the capability to automate various cultivation phases like watering, fertilizing, harvesting and much more. In order to make the cultivation phases smarter, we deploy smart sensors in the fields to sense the water level, photo sensors to ensure sufficient sunlight is available for plant’s growth, sensors to sense the nitrogen content and thereby to inform the farmer to initiate steps for proper fertilizing, etc. There are many works done in this area, and much more is progressing in the labs now. We analyzed the various standard IoT techniques used in Agriculture sector based on hardware and software, and thereby deriving the existing challenges for making farming much smarter and efficient.

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term which was quite unfamiliar to ordinary people in older days. But in this era of smart technology and smarter systems, IoT became much popular. IoT is an emerging field which can play a vital role in almost all fields and disciplines including agriculture, health sector, home automation, aviation and transport, defense and military applications and much more. The Internet of things (stylized Internet of Things or IoT) is the internetworking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings, and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. IoT can be used to make the objects or things smarter by remotely sensing or controlling it. Internet of Things comprises things that have unique identities and are connected to the internet [2]. IoT describes a system consist of various items in the physical world, and sensors within or attached to these items which are connected to the Internet via wireless and wired Internet connections. These sensors can use various types of local area connections such as RFID, NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zig-bee. Sensors can also have wide area connectivity such as GSM, GPRS, 3G, and LTE.

Conclusion

Internet of Things (IoT) is playing an appreciable role in all fields of the globe like agriculture, aviation, transport, health care, etc. Our work reviews the growth and progress of IoT-based system used in the agriculture sector and in smart farming. It all started by using Zig-bee based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) later followed by centralized IoT boards and processors like Arduino, Raspberry PI, etc. They are using a wide set of sensors like temperature and humidity sensor, light sensor, soil moisture sensor, pH sensor, PIR motion sensor, etc. The main challenge for the researchers in this area is to design more accurate and useful sensors that will aid in monitoring plant growth. Power management to the sensors and central system is also a constraint. Designers should opt for low powered intelligent sensors and board to use the power efficiently. On the software side our analysis may help the software architect to choose the suitable pattern for their IoT use case. Our review analysis shows that IoT is still an exploring area for the researchers to make the farming much smarter by designing much smarter objects or things using secure and interoperable software architectures.

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