Architecture and communication protocol to monitor and control water quality and irrigation in agricultural environments

[ES] La introducción de soluciones tecnológicas en la agricultura permite reducir el uso de recursos y aumentar la producción de los cultivos. Además, la calidad del agua de regadío se puede monitorizar para asegurar la seguridad de los productos para el consumo humano. Sin embargo, la localización remota de la mayoría de los campos presenta un problema para proveer de cobertura inalámbrica a los nodos sensores y actuadores desplegados en los campos y los canales de agua para regadío. El trabajo presentado en esta tesis aborda el problema de habilitar la comunicación inalámbrica entre los dispositivos electrónicos desplegados para la monitorización de la calidad del agua y el campo a través de un protocolo de comunicación y arquitectura heterogéneos. La primera parte de esta tesis introduce los sistemas de agricultura de precisión (PA) y la importancia de la monitorización de la calidad del agua y el campo. Asimismo, las tecnologías que permiten la comunicación inalámbrica en sistemas PA y el uso de soluciones alternativas como el internet de las cosas bajo tierra (IoUT) y los vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAV) se introducen también. Después, se realiza un análisis en profundidad del estado del arte respecto a los sensores para la monitorización del agua, el campo y las condiciones meteorológicas, así como sobre las tecnologías inalámbricas más empleadas en PA. Además, las tendencias actuales y los desafíos de los sistemas de internet de las cosas (IoT) para regadío, incluyendo las soluciones alternativas introducidas anteriormente, han sido abordados en detalle. A continuación, se presenta la arquitectura propuesta para el sistema, la cual incluye las áreas de interés para las actividades monitorización que incluye las áreas de los canales y el campo. A su vez, la descripción y los algoritmos de operación de los nodos sensores contemplados para cada área son proporcionados. El siguiente capítulo detalla el protocolo de comunicación heterogéneo propuesto, incluyendo los mensajes y alertas del sistema. Adicionalmente, se presenta una nueva topología de árbol para redes híbridas LoRa/WiFi multisalto. Las funcionalidades específicas adicionales concebidas para la arquitectura propuesta están descritas en el siguiente capítulo. Éstas incluyen algoritmos de agregación de datos para la topología propuesta, un esquema de las amenazas de seguridad para los sistemas PA, algoritmos de ahorro de energía y tolerancia a fallos, comunicación bajo tierra para IoUT y el uso de drones para adquisición de datos. Después, los resultados de las simulaciones para las soluciones propuestas anteriormente son presentados. Finalmente, se tratan las pruebas realizadas en entornos reales para el protocolo heterogéneo presentado, las diferentes estrategias de despliegue de los nodos empleados, el consumo energético y la función de cuantificación de fruta. Estas pruebas demuestran la validez de la arquitectura y protocolo de comunicación heterogéneos que se han propuesto.[CA] La introducció de solucions tecnològiques en l'agricultura permet reduir l'ús de recursos i augmentar la producció dels cultius. A més, la qualitat de l'aigua de regadiu es pot monitoritzar per assegurar la qualitat dels productes per al consum humà. No obstant això, la localització remota de la majoria dels camps presenta un problema per a proveir de cobertura sense fils als nodes sensors i actuadors desplegats als camps i els canals d'aigua per a regadiu. El treball presentat en aquesta tesi tracta el problema d'habilitar la comunicació sense fils entre els dispositius electrònics desplegats per a la monitorització de la qualitat de l'aigua i el camp a través d'un protocol de comunicació i arquitectura heterogenis. La primera part d'aquesta tesi introdueix els sistemes d'agricultura de precisió (PA) i la importància de la monitorització de la qualitat de l'aigua i el camp. Així mateix, també s'introdueixen les tecnologies que permeten la comunicació sense fils en sistemes PA i l'ús de solucions alternatives com l'Internet de les coses sota terra (IoUT) i els vehicles aeris no tripulats (UAV). Després, es realitza una anàlisi en profunditat de l'estat de l'art respecte als sensors per a la monitorització de l'aigua, el camp i les condicions meteorològiques, així com sobre les tecnologies sense fils més emprades en PA. S'aborden les tendències actuals i els reptes dels sistemes d'internet de les coses (IoT) per a regadiu, incloent les solucions alternatives introduïdes anteriorment. A continuació, es presenta l'arquitectura proposada per al sistema, on s'inclouen les àrees d'interès per a les activitats monitorització en els canals i el camp. Finalment, es proporciona la descripció i els algoritmes d'operació dels nodes sensors contemplats per a cada àrea. El següent capítol detalla el protocol de comunicació heterogeni proposat, així como el disseny del missatges i alertes que el sistema proposa. A més, es presenta una nova topologia d'arbre per a xarxes híbrides Lora/WiFi multi-salt. Les funcionalitats específiques addicionals concebudes per l'arquitectura proposada estan descrites en el següent capítol. Aquestes inclouen algoritmes d'agregació de dades per a la topologia proposta, un esquema de les alertes de seguretat per als sistemes PA, algoritmes d'estalvi d'energia i tolerància a fallades, comunicació per a IoUT i l'ús de drons per a adquisició de dades. Després, es presenten els resultats de les simulacions per a les solucions proposades. Finalment, es duen a terme les proves en entorns reals per al protocol heterogeni dissenyat. A més s'expliquen les diferents estratègies de desplegament dels nodes empleats, el consum energètic, així com, la funció de quantificació de fruita. Els resultats d'aquetes proves demostren la validesa de l'arquitectura i protocol de comunicació heterogenis propost en aquesta tesi.[EN] The introduction of technological solutions in agriculture allows reducing the use of resources and increasing the production of the crops. Furthermore, the quality of the water for irrigation can be monitored to ensure the safety of the produce for human consumption. However, the remote location of most fields presents a problem for providing wireless coverage to the sensing nodes and actuators deployed on the fields and the irrigation water canals. The work presented in this thesis addresses the problem of enabling wireless communication among the electronic devices deployed for water quality and field monitoring through a heterogeneous communication protocol and architecture. The first part of the dissertation introduces Precision Agriculture (PA) systems and the importance of water quality and field monitoring. In addition, the technologies that enable wireless communication in PA systems and the use of alternative solutions such as Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are introduced as well. Then, an in-depth analysis on the state of the art regarding the sensors for water, field and meteorology monitoring and the most utilized wireless technologies in PA is performed. Furthermore, the current trends and challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) irrigation systems, including the alternate solutions previously introduced, have been discussed in detail. Then, the architecture for the proposed system is presented, which includes the areas of interest for the monitoring activities comprised of the canal and field areas. Moreover, the description and operation algorithms of the sensor nodes contemplated for each area is provided. The next chapter details the proposed heterogeneous communication protocol including the messages and alerts of the system. Additionally, a new tree topology for hybrid LoRa/WiFi multi-hop networks is presented. The specific additional functionalities intended for the proposed architecture are described in the following chapter. It includes data aggregation algorithms for the proposed topology, an overview on the security threats of PA systems, energy-saving and fault-tolerance algorithms, underground communication for IoUT, and the use of drones for data acquisition. Then, the simulation results for the solutions previously proposed are presented. Finally, the tests performed in real environments for the presented heterogeneous protocol, the different deployment strategies for the utilized nodes, the energy consumption, and a functionality for fruit quantification are discussed. These tests demonstrate the validity of the proposed heterogeneous architecture and communication protocol.García García, L. (2021). Architecture and communication protocol to monitor and control water quality and irrigation in agricultural environments [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17422

New Protocol and Architecture for a Wastewater Treatment System Intended for Irrigation

[EN] Water quality may be affected by aspects such as pollution from industries, agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, and waste produced by humans. This contamination can affect the produce of the fields irrigated by untreated water. Therefore, it is necessary to add a treatment process in irrigation systems. In this paper, an architecture, communication protocol, and a data analysis algorithm for a wastewater treatment system intended for irrigation are presented. Our system includes a smart group-based wireless sensor network that is able to detect high salinity levels and pollution stains, such as oil spills. When contamination is detected, the water is led into auxiliary canals that perform the biosorption process to treat the water and dump it back into the main canal. Simulations were performed to assess the amount of data stored on the secure digital (SD) card, the consumed bandwidth, and the energy consumption of our proposal. The results show the system has a low bandwidth consumption with a maximum of 2.58 kbps for the setting of two daily data transmissions of the node in the last auxiliary canal. Furthermore, it can sustain the energy consumption in adverse conditions, where the node with the highest energy consumption reaches the lowest energy value of 12,320 mW/h.This research was partially funded by the European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET joint activities and beyond) project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR. This work has also been partially funded by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia through the post-doctoral PAID-10-20 program and by Conselleria de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte with the Subvenciones para la contratacion de personal investigador en fase postdoctoral, grant number APOSTD/2019/04.Jimenez, JM.; Parra-Boronat, L.; García, L.; Lloret, J.; Mauri, PV.; Lorenz, P. (2021). New Protocol and Architecture for a Wastewater Treatment System Intended for Irrigation. Applied Sciences. 11(8):1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11083648S12111

Internet of Things Applications in Precision Agriculture: A Review

The goal of this paper is to review the implementation of an Internet of Things (IoT)-based system in the precision agriculture sector. Each year, farmers suffer enormous losses as a result of insect infestations and a lack of equipment to manage the farm effectively. The selected article summarises the recommended systematic equipment and approach for implementing an IoT in smart farming. This review's purpose is to identify and discuss the significant devices, cloud platforms, communication protocols, and data processing methodologies. This review highlights an updated technology for agricultural smart management by revising every area, such as crop field data and application utilization. By customizing their technology spending decisions, agriculture stakeholders can better protect the environment and increase food production in a way that meets future global demand. Last but not least, the contribution of this research is that the use of IoT in the agricultural sector helps to improve sensing and monitoring of production, including farm resource usage, animal behavior, crop growth, and food processing. Also, it provides a better understanding of the individual agricultural circumstances, such as environmental and weather conditions, the growth of weeds, pests, and diseases

A Systematic Review of IoT Solutions for Smart Farming

The world population growth is increasing the demand for food production. Furthermore, the reduction of the workforce in rural areas and the increase in production costs are challenges for food production nowadays. Smart farming is a farm management concept that may use Internet of Things (IoT) to overcome the current challenges of food production. This work uses the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews (PRISMA) methodology to systematically review the existing literature on smart farming with IoT. The review aims to identify the main devices, platforms, network protocols, processing data technologies and the applicability of smart farming with IoT to agriculture. The review shows an evolution in the way data is processed in recent years. Traditional approaches mostly used data in a reactive manner. In more recent approaches, however, new technological developments allowed the use of data to prevent crop problems and to improve the accuracy of crop diagnosis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ag-IoT for crop and environment monitoring: Past, present, and future

CONTEXT: Automated monitoring of the soil-plant-atmospheric continuum at a high spatiotemporal resolution is a key to transform the labor-intensive, experience-based decision making to an automatic, data-driven approach in agricultural production. Growers could make better management decisions by leveraging the real-time field data while researchers could utilize these data to answer key scientific questions. Traditionally, data collection in agricultural fields, which largely relies on human labor, can only generate limited numbers of data points with low resolution and accuracy. During the last two decades, crop monitoring has drastically evolved with the advancement of modern sensing technologies. Most importantly, the introduction of IoT (Internet of Things) into crop, soil, and microclimate sensing has transformed crop monitoring into a quantitative and data-driven work from a qualitative and experience-based task. OBJECTIVE: Ag-IoT systems enable a data pipeline for modern agriculture that includes data collection, transmission, storage, visualization, analysis, and decision-making. This review serves as a technical guide for Ag-IoT system design and development for crop, soil, and microclimate monitoring. METHODS: It highlighted Ag-IoT platforms presented in 115 academic publications between 2011 and 2021 worldwide. These publications were analyzed based on the types of sensors and actuators used, main control boards, types of farming, crops observed, communication technologies and protocols, power supplies, and energy storage used in Ag-IoT platforms

Proposal of architecture for IoT solution for monitoring and management of plantations

The world population growth is increasing the demand for food production. Furthermore, the reduction of the workforce in rural areas and the increase in production costs are challenges for food production nowadays. Smart farming is a farm management concept that may use Internet of Things (IoT) to overcome the current challenges of food production This work presents a systematic review of the existing literature on smart farming with IoT. The systematic review reveals an evolution in the way data are processed by IoT solutions in recent years. Traditional approaches mostly used data in a reactive manner. In contrast, recent approaches allowed the use of data to prevent crop problems and to improve the accuracy of crop diagnosis. Based on the finds of the systematic review, this work proposes an architecture of an IoT solution that enables monitoring and management of crops in real time. The proposed architecture allows the usage of big data and machine learning to process the collected data. A prototype is implemented to validate the operation of the proposed architecture and a security risk assessment of the implemented prototype is carried out. The implemented prototype successfully validates the proposed architecture. The architecture presented in this work allows the implementation of IoT solutions in different scenarios of farming, such as indoor and outdoor

Implementing Efficient and Multi-Hop Image Acquisition In Remote Monitoring IoT systems using LoRa Technology

Remote sensing or monitoring through the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is considered an economical and convenient manner in which to collect information without cumbersome human intervention. Unfortunately, due to challenging deployment conditions, such as large geographic area, and lack of electricity and network infrastructure, designing such wireless sensor networks for large-scale farms or forests is difficult and expensive. Many WSN-appropriate wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and 6LoWPAN, have been widely adopted in remote sensing. The performance of these technologies, however, is not sufficient for use across large areas. Generally, as the geographical scope expands, more devices need to be employed to expand network coverage, so the number and cost of devices in wireless sensor networks will increase dramatically. Besides, this type of deployment usually not only has a high probability of failure and high transmission costs, but also imposes additional overhead on system management and maintenance. LoRa is an emerging physical layer standard for long range wireless communication. By utilizing chirp spread spectrum modulation, LoRa features a long communication range and broad signal coverage. At the same time, LoRa also has low power consumption. Thus, LoRa outperforms similar technologies in terms of hardware cost, power consumption and radio coverage. It is also considered to be one of the promising solutions for the future of the Internet of Things (IoT). As the research and development of LoRa are still in its early stages, it lacks sufficient support for multi-packet transport and complex deployment topologies. Therefore, LoRa is not able to further expand its network coverage and efficiently support big data transfers like other conventional technologies. Besides, due to the smaller payload and data rate in LoRa physical design, it is more challenging to implement these features in LoRa. These shortcomings limit the potential for LoRa to be used in more productive application scenarios. This thesis addresses the problem of multi-packet and multi-hop transmission using LoRa by proposing two novel protocols, namely Multi-Packet LoRa (MPLR) and Multi-Hop LoRa (MHLR). LoRa's ability to transmit large messages is first evaluated in this thesis, and then the protocols are well designed and implemented to enrich LoRa's possibilities in image transmission applications and multi-hop topologies. MPLR introduces a reliable transport mechanism for multi-packet sensory data, making its network not limited to the transmission of small sensor data only. In collaboration with a data channel reservation technique, MPLR is able to greatly mitigate data collisions caused by the increased transmission time in laboratory experiments. MHLR realizes efficient routing in LoRa multi-hop transmission by utilizing the power of machine learning. The results of both indoor and outdoor experiments show that the machine learning based routing is effective in wireless sensor networks

Low-power wide-area networks : design goals, architecture, suitability to use cases and research challenges

Previous survey articles on Low-Powered Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) lack a systematic analysis of the design goals of LPWAN and the design decisions adopted by various commercially available and emerging LPWAN technologies, and no study has analysed how their design decisions impact their ability to meet design goals. Assessing a technology's ability to meet design goals is essential in determining suitable technologies for a given application. To address these gaps, we have analysed six prominent design goals and identified the design decisions used to meet each goal in the eight LPWAN technologies, ranging from technical consideration to business model, and determined which specific technique in a design decision will help meet each goal to the greatest extent. System architecture and specifications are presented for those LPWAN solutions, and their ability to meet each design goal is evaluated. We outline seventeen use cases across twelve domains that require large low power network infrastructure and prioritise each design goal's importance to those applications as Low, Moderate, or High. Using these priorities and each technology's suitability for meeting design goals, we suggest appropriate LPWAN technologies for each use case. Finally, a number of research challenges are presented for current and future technologies. © 2013 IEEE

A “Plant-Wearable System” for Its Health Monitoring by Intra- and Interplant Communication

A step forward in smart agriculture is moving to direct monitoring plants and crops instead of their environment. Understanding plant status is crucial in improving food production and reducing the usage of water and chemicals in agriculture. Here, we propose a “plant-wearable,” low-cost, and low-power method to measure in-vivo green plant stem frequency as the indicator for plant watering stress status. Our method is based on measuring the frequency of a digital signal obtained with a relaxation oscillator where the plant is a part of the feedback loop. The frequency was correlated with the soil water potential, used as a critical indicator of plant water stress, and an 85% correlation was found. In this way, the measuring system matches all the requirements of smart agriculture and Internet of Things (IoT): ultra-low-cost, low-complexity, ultra-low-power, and small sizes, introducing the concept of wearability in plant monitoring. The proposed solution exploits the plant and the soil as a communication channel: the signal carrying the plant watering stress status information is transmitted to a receiving system connected to a different plant. The system's current consumption is lower than 50 μμ A during the transmission in the plant and 40 mA for wireless communication. During inactivity periods, the total current consumption is lower than 15 μμ A. Another important aspect is that the system has to be energy autonomous. Our proposal is based on energy harvesting solutions from multiple sources: solar cells and plant microbial fuel cells. This way, the system is batteryless, thanks to supercapacitors as a storage element. The system can be deployed in the fields and used to monitor plants directly in their environment

Security and Privacy for Modern Wireless Communication Systems

The aim of this reprint focuses on the latest protocol research, software/hardware development and implementation, and system architecture design in addressing emerging security and privacy issues for modern wireless communication networks. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: deep-learning-based security and privacy design; covert communications; information-theoretical foundations for advanced security and privacy techniques; lightweight cryptography for power constrained networks; physical layer key generation; prototypes and testbeds for security and privacy solutions; encryption and decryption algorithm for low-latency constrained networks; security protocols for modern wireless communication networks; network intrusion detection; physical layer design with security consideration; anonymity in data transmission; vulnerabilities in security and privacy in modern wireless communication networks; challenges of security and privacy in node–edge–cloud computation; security and privacy design for low-power wide-area IoT networks; security and privacy design for vehicle networks; security and privacy design for underwater communications networks