Experimental performance of soil monitoring system using IoT technique for automatic drip irrigation

Abstract

SummaryThis paper proposes an IoT‐enabled soil monitoring system using wireless sensor network for automatic irrigation in agricultural applications, especially for lemongrass plants, where an automated control system is required for irrigation applications. This can solve the problem of the water crisis, which is faced by the farmers during the cultivation of the crop in the field. This controls the water supply in the irrigation process using an IoT communication system. A system architecture for soil monitoring and controlling irrigation using IoT technique is designed where the different sensors and actuators like humidity, soil moisture, temperature, pump, and so forth are connected with a node microcontrol unit and message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol for enhancing communication capabilities. This wireless sensor network gives feedback to the system. This provides automation by the on/off pump system during drip irrigation. The sensor data are displayed on a PC or mobile phone through wireless communication and an IoT cloud platform. An experimental testing setup is developed and the experimental performance of a soil monitoring system using IoT technique for automatic drip irrigation has been carried out and soil moisture data are also stored in a cloud server for analytics. The performance shows that the MQTT protocol sends data within 48 s to the IoT cloud so that the data can be acquired in a faster manner. This shows that this kind of soil monitoring system is suitable for automatic drip irrigation, which enhances the farming process and overcomes the water crises in the agricultural system by reducing the wastage of water.