Flexible IoT Agriculture Systems for Irrigation Control Based on Software Services.

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Agricultural Engineering

Background:

• Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in agriculture often prioritize hardware, neglecting software development, which is a critical bottleneck for performance, reliability, and security.
• Existing IoT agricultural solutions are typically tailored to specific functions, limiting flexibility and reusability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a software-centric framework for designing flexible and robust IoT systems.
• To address the software bottleneck in IoT development by adopting a service-oriented architecture.
• To demonstrate the framework's applicability in an efficient agricultural irrigation use case.

Main Methods:

• Developed a software framework based on a client-server model utilizing RESTful interactions for IoT system design.
• Decomposed software services into constituent functions and operations for both client and server sides.
• Implemented and evaluated the framework on an IoT-based agricultural irrigation system.

Main Results:

• The proposed framework enables a simple and novel design structure for IoT systems in agriculture.
• The implemented irrigation system effectively monitors field conditions, processes data, and detects alarms.
• The solution demonstrated bounded temporal overhead, achieving a response time of approximately 11 seconds for 3000 requests, suitable for the target domain.

Conclusions:

• A software-centric approach is crucial for advancing IoT system development in agriculture.
• The developed framework offers a flexible and efficient method for designing IoT software, particularly for irrigation management.
• The framework's performance is validated, showing its suitability for real-world agricultural applications.