Performance Analysis of Internet of Underground Things Network in Smart and Greenhouse Agriculture

Abstract

Yield improvement of the smart and greenhouse agriculture necessities to adopt the recently developed technologies. Therefore, sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) and/or the Internet of Underground Things (IOUT) should be included. The Internet of Underground Things (IOUT) communication network consists of a large number of sensors or actuators deployed in a geographical area. In IOUT networks, the data is collected by multiple sinks and sent over to the central processing unit. The special needs for this type of network pose great challenges for network architecture and implementation. Accurately modeling the information generated by each sensor device is essential for designing a smart system for precision agriculture. Successful design leads to improving the whole performance of the communication network and increases the productivity of the plants by early detecting hazards and diseases of the plants. This research aims to model and measure the performance of communication networks of underground sensor devices and above-ground networks with different scenarios. The traffic of each device in the network is modeled by truncated power tail distribution to represent the real burst of the collected information traffic. The impact of burst traffic on the performance is investigated analytically and by simulation. The model compares two common types of traffic models using truncated power tail distribution. Analyzing all the collected information could lead to adjusting the environmental conditions (including soil moisture and water feed) to set then to meet the optimal conditions of the plants to improve the smart and greenhouse agriculture productivity to produce more food to help support the related SDGs. Keywords:  Traffic Modeling, Performance Modeling, Communication network, Greenhouse agriculture, Smart/precision agriculture