Agriculture and Internet of Things (IoT)

Water, soil, seeds and nutrients (fertilizers) are the basic elements of agricultural production system. Therefore the proper management of these important elements is important. There are numerous problems in managing the resources because of limited use of technology in many of the developing countries like India. One more reason is the less availability of labour. As the world’s population is increasing day by day, the agricultural production should increase. To keep up with rising populations and income growth, global food production must increase by 70 per cent in order to be able to feed the world. Therefore it is essential to exploit all modern tools and methods available by bringing information technology and agriculture science together for improved agricultural production.

One of the farming management concepts is the “precision agriculture”. Precision agriculture is the concept of collecting real time data on weather, soil and air quality, crop maturity and even equipment and labourer costs and availability, predictive analytics can be used to make smarter decisions. This concept is used to maximize food production, minimize environmental impact and reduce cost. For achieving precision farming, sensors are placed throughout the fields are used to measure temperature, humidity of the soil and surrounding air. This data is collected and processed by the control centres in real time to help farmers make the best decisions with regard to planting, fertilizing, irrigation and harvesting crops.

There are number of techniques used for precision agriculture like Global positioning system (GPS), Crop Scouting, Grid Soil Sampling, Geographic information system (GIS) and the most important is remote sensing. Remote sensing means the real time data is sensed by remote sensors and will be provided to the control servers. These sensors are capable of transmitting data from hope to hope to the central server. Collectively these sensors create a network called as wireless sensor network. The collaborative working of these “smart objects” give rise to new concept called as INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT).

IoT is the network, which any objects can be connected to the internet for information exchange and communication in order to achieve the objects intelligent identification, according to the agreed protocol through RFID, sensors, GPS and other information sensing devices. By the concept of IoT the farmers can connect anything with the internet for exchange of information to make the correct action decision making. By the use of IoT the capability of precision agriculture will be definitely increased by large amount. IoT helps in two way communication between the smart objects and the farmers or any specific user, which helps in taking real time decisions.

IoT is the Internet of smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are the building blocks of internet of things. IoT is the new concept; so many researches are going on in the terms of system architecture, design and development and human involvement. For example, what is the right balance for the distribution of functionality between smart objects and the supporting infrastructure? How do we model and represent smart objects intelligence? What are appropriate programming modes? And how people make sense and interact with small physical objects? There are three main design issues in creating the smart objects, first is to make the object aware that is it must be good at sensing, interpreting data and reacting to the events. Second is the representation means programming the device and interaction means interface between the device and user.

Following are the key technical issues.

Heterogeneity

For IoT to be successful the basic requirement is its ability to integrate many types of devices, technologies, and services. At the device level, this includes very diverse features in terms of data communication capabilities (e.g., data-rates and/or reliability), computational and storage power, availability of energy, flexibility in handling different technologies, mobility, etc.

Connectivity

Another key area of investigation relates to how to provide communications capabilities to the various devices involved, that in many cases will be wireless. Issues such as communications energy consumption, antenna design, interoperability of different technologies (e.g., via cognitive radio capabilities), adaptive techniques for a dynamic environment in the face of possibly heavily constrained resources, etc. will have to be addressed. It will be important to understand what needs to be connected so as to provide the necessary communications capabilities, while avoiding that a system that is too connected becomes hard to manage (e.g., due to excessive interference). In a more futuristic scenario, alternative means of communications may also be considered, including for example communications through organic matter.

Naming, Addressing and Identification

Identifying an object is one of the primary pillars of the IoT. A key problem is how to split Location and Identification of a device. Although workarounds exist for IPv4, and some mechanisms were introduced in IPv6 to support Internet mobility, the heterogeneity of existing identification mechanisms and their co-existence and efficient use across different systems make this problem wider and more complex to solve for RFIDs. While the RFID world has been initially dominated by the use of EPC for identification, uID has recently gained popularity as a more flexible alternative.

Localization

For placing the devices we should get the target position of the sensor. For finding the position different techniques are used. For complex area map of the field is needed to get the position or location information. GPS enabled sensors are used for getting the position of the sensors when the position of sensors is needed at each point of time. GPS inclusion is too expensive to enable in sensor node so different location information gathering scheme must be proposed.

Energy

Sensors are autonomous device that is it will work without any human assistance, so sensor obects needs a battery for energy. It is almost infeasible to recharge all battery since WSN consists of thousands of sensors, so it is essential to manage energy resources to increase the life of network. Most of the energy is used in communication purpose. Balancing energy consumption by optimal placement of sensors is important. If we consider mobile WSN, then mobility itself required energy, so managing resources is very essential.

Scalability

Scalability is an important issue during deployment since it will affect coverage, cost and performance of network. Areas with high density increase network cost, computation overhead, whereas area with low density may arise the problem of coverage holes or network partitions. Communications protocols will therefore pose several challenges. Management of the network becomes very difficult in a large distributed environment, and solutions to dominate the complexity\ need to be found.

Network Lifetime

Depending on the application, the required lifetime of a IoT sensor network may range from some hours to several years. The necessary lifetime has a high impact on the required degree of energy efficiency and robustness of the system.

Privacy and Security

One major social concern related to pervasive systems that have learning and reasoning capabilities and can collect and store data about the environment is the way such data may be used (or abused). In addition, in applications where the system is called to act on the physical reality, tampering with the system by a malicious intruder may result in severe consequences in terms of performance, operational disruption, theft, or even safety hazards. In a wireless IoT context, besides the obvious weakness of the radio channel with regard to eavesdropping, the heavily constrained nature of the
devices and the limited bandwidth available make it very challenging to provide effective security mechanisms via simple algorithms with limited room for message exchanges.

Self-Management Capabilities

In order to support the expected scale of the IoT, devices will need to self-manage without external intervention. Orchestration and management mechanisms as well as information models will have to be defined taking into account this scale of deployment. The success of the Internet lies in its minimalistic best-effort service approach. When trying to apply a similarly simple approach to the IoT architecture, we have to face the exponential growth in complexity that the connection of billions of heterogeneous devices will bring, which will call for context awareness, self-organization, self- management, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protection capabilities.