Collaborative actuation of wireless sensor and actuator networks for the agriculture industry.

This paper investigates the deployment of collaborative estimation and actuation scheme of wireless sensor and actuator networks for the agriculture industry. In our proposed scheme, sensor nodes conduct a local estimation based on the Kalman filter for enhancing the estimation stability and further transmit data to the actuator nodes under a multi-rate transmission mode for enhancing the overall energy efficiency of the wireless network. Considering the mutual effect of related clusters, a collaborative actuation scheme of actuator nodes is integrated into our proposed scheme for improving the estimation accuracy and convergence speed. With an accurate estimation of the changes in the environmental parameters, combining the fuzzy neural network with the PID control algorithm, the actuator exerts reliable control over the environmental parameters. Performance evaluations and simulation analysis conducted based on the effects of temperature demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in controlling the greenhouse environmental changes for in the agriculture industry.N/

Sensor Networks in the Low Lands

This paper provides an overview of scientific and industrial developments of the last decade in the area of sensor networks in The Netherlands (Low Lands). The goal is to highlight areas in which the Netherlands has made most contributions and is currently a dominant player in the field of sensor networks. On the one hand, motivations, addressed topics, and initiatives taken in this period are presented, while on the other hand, special emphasis is given to identifying current and future trends and formulating a vision for the coming five to ten years. The presented overview and trend analysis clearly show that Dutch research and industrial efforts, in line with recent worldwide developments in the field of sensor technology, present a clear shift from sensor node platforms, operating systems, communication, networking, and data management aspects of the sensor networks to reasoning/cognition, control, and actuation

Internet of Things for Sustainability: Perspectives in Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Future Trends

In the sustainability IoT, the cybersecurity risks to things, sensors, and monitoring systems are distinct from the conventional networking systems in many aspects. The interaction of sustainability IoT with the physical world phenomena (e.g., weather, climate, water, and oceans) is mostly not found in the modern information technology systems. Accordingly, actuation, the ability of these devices to make changes in real world based on sensing and monitoring, requires special consideration in terms of privacy and security. Moreover, the energy efficiency, safety, power, performance requirements of these device distinguish them from conventional computers systems. In this chapter, the cybersecurity approaches towards sustainability IoT are discussed in detail. The sustainability IoT risk categorization, risk mitigation goals, and implementation aspects are analyzed. The openness paradox and data dichotomy between privacy and sharing is analyzed. Accordingly, the IoT technology and security standard developments activities are highlighted. The perspectives on opportunities and challenges in IoT for sustainability are given. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of sustainability IoT cybersecurity case studies

The impact of agricultural activities on water quality: a case for collaborative catchment-scale management using integrated wireless sensor networks

The challenge of improving water quality is a growing global concern, typified by the European Commission Water Framework Directive and the United States Clean Water Act. The main drivers of poor water quality are economics, poor water management, agricultural practices and urban development. This paper reviews the extensive role of non-point sources, in particular the outdated agricultural practices, with respect to nutrient and contaminant contributions. Water quality monitoring (WQM) is currently undertaken through a number of data acquisition methods from grab sampling to satellite based remote sensing of water bodies. Based on the surveyed sampling methods and their numerous limitations, it is proposed that wireless sensor networks (WSNs), despite their own limitations, are still very attractive and effective for real-time spatio-temporal data collection for WQM applications. WSNs have been employed for WQM of surface and ground water and catchments, and have been fundamental in advancing the knowledge of contaminants trends through their high resolution observations. However, these applications have yet to explore the implementation and impact of this technology for management and control decisions, to minimize and prevent individual stakeholder’s contributions, in an autonomous and dynamic manner. Here, the potential of WSN-controlled agricultural activities and different environmental compartments for integrated water quality management is presented and limitations of WSN in agriculture and WQM are identified. Finally, a case for collaborative networks at catchment scale is proposed for enabling cooperation among individually networked activities/stakeholders (farming activities, water bodies) for integrated water quality monitoring, control and management

Sub-1 GHz Wireless Nodes Performance Evaluation for Intelligent Greenhouse System

Greenhouses provide not only solution to problems faced by conventional farming systems but also play an important role to improve the energy efficiency and environmentally friendly awareness. To achieve benefits of greenhouse farming system in terms of energy efficiency, research related to this issue have been done by many researchers. However, resources that concern on how to practically implement the particular energy-saving technology for greenhouses need to be improved. In this research, field experiment results related to low-power communication between nodes have been reported by implementing universal prototype modules. The pros and cons of existing communication technology, the proposed architecture of network and module analysis, and the performance evaluation of the proposed module dedicated to intelligent greenhouse farming system were also discussed

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Cyber-Agricultural Systems for Crop Breeding and Sustainable Production

The Cyber-Agricultural System (CAS) Represents an overarching Framework of Agriculture that Leverages Recent Advances in Ubiquitous Sensing, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Actuators, and Scalable Cyberinfrastructure (CI) in Both Breeding and Production Agriculture. We Discuss the Recent Progress and Perspective of the Three Fundamental Components of CAS – Sensing, Modeling, and Actuation – and the Emerging Concept of Agricultural Digital Twins (DTs). We Also Discuss How Scalable CI is Becoming a Key Enabler of Smart Agriculture. in This Review We Shed Light on the Significance of CAS in Revolutionizing Crop Breeding and Production by Enhancing Efficiency, Productivity, Sustainability, and Resilience to Changing Climate. Finally, We Identify Underexplored and Promising Future Directions for CAS Research and Development

Machine Learning in Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Cities:A Survey

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have huge potential to efficiently manage the automated operation of the internet of things (IoT) nodes deployed in smart cities. In smart cities, the major IoT applications are smart traffic monitoring, smart waste management, smart buildings and patient healthcare monitoring. The small size IoT nodes based on low power Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) standard and wireless sensor networks (WSN) (IEEE 802.15.4) standard are generally used for transmission of data to a remote location using gateways. The WSN based IoT (WSN-IoT) design problems include network coverage and connectivity issues, energy consumption, bandwidth requirement, network lifetime maximization, communication protocols and state of the art infrastructure. In this paper, the authors propose machine learning methods as an optimization tool for regular WSN-IoT nodes deployed in smart city applications. As per the author’s knowledge, this is the first in-depth literature survey of all ML techniques in the field of low power consumption WSN-IoT for smart cities. The results of this unique survey article show that the supervised learning algorithms have been most widely used (61%) as compared to reinforcement learning (27%) and unsupervised learning (12%) for smart city applications

Distributed scheduling algorithms for LoRa-based wide area cyber-physical systems

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are a class of wireless communication protocols that work over long distances, consume low power and support low datarates. LPWANs have been designed for monitoring applications, with sparse communication from nodes to servers and sparser from servers to nodes. Inspite of their initial design, LPWANs have the potential to target applications with higher and stricter requirements like those of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Due to their long-range capabilities, LPWANs can specifically target CPS applications distributed over a wide-area, which is referred to as Wide-Area CPS (WA-CPS). Augmenting WA-CPSs with wireless communication would allow for more flexible, low-cost and easily maintainable deployment. However, wireless communications come with problems like reduced reliability and unpredictable latencies, making them harder to use for CPSs. With this intention, this thesis explores the use of LPWANs, specifically LoRa, to meet the communication and control requirements of WA-CPSs. The thesis focuses on using LoRa due to its high resilience to noise, several communication parameters to choose from and a freely modifiable communication stack and servers making it ideal for research and deployment. However, LoRaWAN suffers from low reliability due to its ALOHA channel access method. The thesis posits that "Distributed algorithms would increase the protocol's reliability allowing it to meet the requirements of WA-CPSs". Three different application scenarios are explored in this thesis that leverage unexplored aspects of LoRa to meet their requirements. The application scenarios are delay-tolerant vehicular networks, multi-stakeholder WA-CPS deployments and water distribution networks. The systems use novel algorithms to facilitate communication between the nodes and gateways to ensure a highly reliable system. The results outperform state-of-art techniques to prove that LoRa is currently under-utilised and can be used for CPS applications.Open Acces