CLUeFARM: Integrated web-service platform for smart farms

Abstract

Smart farming is a relatively new domain which has popularity nowadays. It emerged from the need to produce more with less effort and it consists of integrating modern technologies in conventional agriculture to raise the quality and the quantity of agricultural products. This paper describes an integrated web-service platform which aims to increase the quality of products grown in farms and to support business development in agriculture related fields. The platform enjoys the benefits of Cloud computing like flexibility, availability or security and it can be accessed at any time, in any place by using just an Internet connection. It allows users to locate and efficiently manage their farms providing access to different types of statistics and predictions. It also acts as a social network allowing users to interact with each other by sending private messages or posting on the forum or on the blog. In addition to describing the services offered by the platform and the interaction between them, this paper also presents the architecture of the system and the performance test results which prove the efficiency of the platform. We have performed in lab validation of the proposed solution, using real equipment and different users with different roles.