A Comprehensive IoT edge based smart irrigation system for tomato cultivation

Abstract

Agriculture industry is the primary engine for a country's economic development. Growing crops using minimum irrigation water is a major challenge for farmers. In conventional farming, crops may be affected by various diseases due to inadequate irrigation scheduling. Recent proposals have suggested using Edge-IoT, AI, and distributed computing to accelerate the inference procedure utilized in smart irrigation applications. The use of resource-constrained edge servers and edge devices used to deliver smart agriculture applications can cause latency-sensitive workloads to interfere with one another. To address this issue, we design a long-range (LoRa) edge IoT computing-based sustainable and customized smart irrigation framework to capture the real-time data of tomato plants. This helps in automatic underground drip irrigation scheduling. This also predicts total water demand and usage, and measure plant growth status. The edge-IoT cloud data transmission control and optimization has been enforced using Smart irrigation data optimization and robust transmission (SIDORT) Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) system. We develop a hybrid algorithm named Linked least traversal (LLT) for machine-to-machine communication (M2M). Also, a Reinforcement learning (RL) based Optimal Soil Wetness Closeness Policy (OSWCP) for irrigation scheduling has been proposed. The performance of the proposed smart irrigation models has been validated through extensive experiments using real-time data in which OSWCP performance has been measured at a 97.88 % accuracy rate. Additionally, a comparison of our proposed architecture has been accomplished by resolving the existing smart irrigation system challenges.