See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/341589970

IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier Data

Storage Facility

Chapter · May 2020

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-3607-6_8

CITATION READS

1 4,533

2 authors, including:

Akhlak Uz Zaman Ashik

Metropolitan University
9 PUBLICATIONS   10 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Ground Control Station Based UAV/Drone View project

Smart LCC Device: LCC-Based IoT Device for measuring urea consumption in major food crops View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Akhlak Uz Zaman Ashik on 28 May 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Chapter 8
IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring
System with Double-Tier Data Storage
Facility

MD Safayet Ahmad and Akhlak Uz Zaman

1 Introduction

Agriculture is the most important sector for humankind to survive their existence.
It enhances a big concern to manage food for people all over the world. Most of
the farmers follow very traditional methods to cultivate their crops. They used to be
present physically on their farm to monitor crops. Use of technology can make this
job easier and time efficient. Internet of things (IoT) is a technology which can send
or receive any data to a server using the Internet. Using this technology, farmers can
monitor the actual condition of the crops without being present in their field. In this
paper, we have proposed a system to monitor the farming field with the help of IoT
technology. This system allows various devices and sensors to send data over the
Internet. It enables farmers to monitor their field remotely from their home by using
a smartphone or a computer.
Almost every field embraces the Internet of things (IoT) revolution [1]. Agri-
culture has seen many transformations and has adopted many machines to improve
the yield. Field (soil and environmental parameters) and crop health monitoring are
important factors for the yield to be of better quality. In recent years, there have been
many technological advancements in agriculture which have led to an increase in
productivity and immunity of the crops. About 70% of the freshwater available in
the world is consumed by the agriculture sector [2], with the help of soil moisture
sensor, we can optimize the irrigation process and use of water [3, 4]. The technology
which plays a key role in this is the Internet of things (IoT) [5]. Traditional agricul-
ture is transforming into smart agriculture due to the penetration of the Internet of
things (IoT) in the agricultural sector. The IoT networks are reducing human labor

MD S. Ahmad · A. U. Zaman (B)

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Metropolitan University, Sylhet, Bangladesh
e-mail: akhlak@metrouni.edu.bd
MD S. Ahmad
e-mail: hridoyshafayet@gmail.com

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 99

M. S. Uddin and J. C. Bansal (eds.), Proceedings of International Joint Conference on
Computational Intelligence, Algorithms for Intelligent Systems,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3607-6_8
100 MD S. Ahmad and A. U. Zaman

requirements by monitoring crop health and field environment remotely. IoT uses a
wireless sensor network (WSN) as the backbone for gathering information for these
monitoring and control applications. The monitoring system consists of end devices
equipped with a variety of sensors to monitor various parameters like temperature,
humidity, pH, soil moisture, etc. and is capable of communicating this data to the
other devices [6, 7]. IoT is helping the farmers by monitoring growth stages of the
crop, and estimation of the yield by giving otherwise restricted low-power, low-cost
devices access to greater processing capabilities via the Internet. Recently, for remote
sensing, drones are widely being used in agriculture [8]. They are diminishing the
role of satellites in monitoring and capturing images for agriculture by providing
control and flexibility [9].
IoT systems for agriculture monitoring should be of low cost such that it is afford-
able to the farmers. In a monitoring network, there are many sensor nodes, sink nodes
and a gateway depending on the network topology and area of the field. The sink
node collects data from the sensor nodes and uploads it to the cloud server [10]. So
in this paper, we proposed a low cost and easy accessible IoT-based smart agriculture
with double-tier architecture of storing all the sensor data.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 presents the related work.
Section 3 proposed network architecture and its deployment. Section 4 we have
discussed system prototype. Section 5 we have discussed the results.

2 Related Works

In recent years, many efforts have been taken to change the traditional agriculture
system. For any smart agriculture system, it should operate in a systematic way to
maximize quality and productivity. So by implementing a more reliable system can
cut the cost, human labor, and wasting resources. But most of them are using the
Wi-Fi module to transmit the sensor data to the server, in real life, which is difficult
to find in an agriculture field. Also, most of them are using one tire data storage
system either cloud database or local database to store data, and if database crush for
any reason there will be no possibility to get all those data back. So unfortunately
because of the complicacy and other problems smart farming is not as widely used
as it has to be.
Liu [11] proposed a wireless sensor network prototype for environmental moni-
toring in greenhouse, where they have created a sensor node and a sink node with a
central management system where sink node was for collecting data from the sensor
nodes wirelessly and then send it to the management center using short message
service (SMS). But the problem was data was not available for monitoring from
anywhere except the management center. And the cost was so high.
Ibrahim Mat in the year 2016 [12] presented a greenhouse management system
(GHMS) was a smart irrigation system (Fig. 1). GHMS is based on wireless sensor
network (WSN) technology. In this particular application, GHMS is used to manage
the greenhouse condition. GHMS will read the wetness of the soil media in the
8 IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier … 101

Fig. 1 Irrigation layout of GHMS [12]

greenhouse by using a moisture sensor. GHMS will read the wetness of the air in
the greenhouse by using the humidity sensor. GHMS read the heat of the air in the
greenhouse by using temperature sensor which was only proposed for a greenhouse.
Athani [13] in the year 2017 presented a soil moisture monitoring using IoT-
enabled Arduino sensors with neural networks for improving soil management for
farmers and predict seasonal rainfall for planning future harvest in North Karnataka—
India. They have used a Wi-Fi module to transmit the data to the Web server database.
But in real life, Wi-Fi is difficult to find in an agriculture field.
And there many more related works for making traditional agriculture system to
smart using IoT technology.

3 Materials and Methods

3.1 System Overview and Architecture

The system could be described as a two-part shown in Fig. 2. The first part is the
sensor mesh network for data acquisition. The environmental parameters including
temperature, humidity, and pH, soil moisture could be sensed by the monitoring
network. After acquisition, data is routed to a special sink node over Bluetooth
communication, which could gather the data and send them to the structured query
language (SQL)-based server using TCP/IP connection through the GSM/GPRS
network and a Web site and mobile application-based remote monitoring system
will be there to visualize all the data to user. We have used Bluetooth communication
between sensors node and sink node because Bluetooth is a standardized protocol
102 MD S. Ahmad and A. U. Zaman

Fig. 2 System overview

for sending and receiving data via a 2.4 GHz wireless link. It is a secure protocol,
and it is perfect for short-range, low-power, low-cost, wireless transmission between
electronic devices.
The whole system architecture is explained in Fig. 3, each sensor node is connected
to a sink node. And all the systems are connected to the Internet and used to send
and receive all the data, the server and provides a central control to the monitoring
field through the Web application and mobile application.

3.2 Monitoring Network

We have selected popular and common components to make our sensor network
technology understood sufficiently. The components of the network are shown in
Table 1, where all the components of a sensor node and sink node are described and
which could be established as a demo mesh network.
8 IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier … 103

Fig. 3 System architecture

Table 1 Network components

Component Description
Sensor node Arduino Nano As development board
Bluetooth module-(HC-05) For communicating with sink node
wirelessly
Moisture sensor SEN-00200 Measuring soil moisture
Temperature and humidity sensor For measuring temperature and
(DHT11) humidity of a particular plot
Sink node Arduino Nano As development board for data
acquisition
Bluetooth module-(HC-05) For getting data from the sensor node
GSM module For sending the collected data to the
cloud server over the mobile network
SD Card module For storing all the data locally in case
of low network or other critical
condition

3.2.1 Sensor Node

Each sensor node consists of Atmega328 microcontroller-based Arduino Nano [14]

is used as the brain to control each sensor node which collects the data from a
DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor as well as from the moisture sensor (SEN-
00200), etc. And send all the data to sink node using Bluetooth module HC-05. All
104 MD S. Ahmad and A. U. Zaman

Fig. 4 Sensor node

the sensors and Bluetooth module are connected to the Atmega328 microcontroller-
based Arduino Nano by serial port (Fig. 4).

3.2.2 Sink Node

The sink node is composed of an Arduino Nano board and Bluetooth module
HC-05, GSM module (Sim900A) connected with the board. Bluetooth module is
for receiving data from all sensors node wirelessly. An SD card module with a micro
SD card is connected to the Arduino board for store all the data collected from sen-
sors node locally. And a GSM module is also connected to the board for sending all
the collected data to a remote server.
Here, we used two-tier architecture for storing sensor data for data security. Data
will be stored in local storage and then all data will be sent to the remote server
through the GSM network. So that in case of the low network, server problem or any
other problem occurs with the GSM module, network or server we do not need to
worry about the data during the period of disconnection.

3.3 Management Software

A free Web hosting service is used for a Web server construction. A Web page
was composed of simple PHP that can directly connect to and manipulate a database
table. The command “mysqli_connect” is used to establish a connection to a MySQL
database. After the connection is established, the field information can be entered
into a designated table by executing a SQL INSERT statement through the PHP
function “mysqli_query”.
For each sensor node data, there will be a separate data table. The structure of
the field data table is listed in Table 2. It consists of ID fields (ID, NodeID) and a
8 IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier … 105

Table 2 Structure of a node

Attribute name Type Properties
data in the database
ID int(5) The ID of an individual record
NodeID int(5) The ID of the Node
Time Timestamp The timestamp in milliseconds
Temperature Double The temperature in degree
celsius
Humidity Double The humidity in percentage
Moisture Double The moisture level
PH Double PH level

sensor node information fields (time, temperature, humidity, moisture, and PH). The
“ID” field is a primary key designed to have auto-increment attribute so it can be
used to distinguish respective rows. Sequence numbers are assigned automatically
when node information is inserted. “NodeID” field can be used to store as a node
unique ID if users want to track any particular node information. The “Time” field
automatically stores current time due to the use of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP when
the node information is received.

4 Results and Discussion

In order to analyze and optimize system performance, we have conducted some

rudimentary experiments. This section will show some experiments results.

4.1 Sensors Data

The monitoring network was installed in a demo field located on Companyganj,

Sylhet, Bangladesh. Temporal and spatial variations in temperature, humidity, and
soil moisture are measured continually and sent to the central server database. The
output values are fetched from the database. Figure 5 shows 24 h of temperature data
from four nodes and also for humidity in Fig. 6 which are placed into four different
parts of the demo field.

4.2 Data Visualization

We have used a Web site-based and mobile app-based system for data visualization
which will fetch the data from the database visualizes these using different types of
graphs shown in Fig. 7. After fetching the moisture readings from the database, we
106 MD S. Ahmad and A. U. Zaman

Fig. 5 Sink node

Fig. 6 Graph of temperature

are going to display the moisture readings which include timestamp and moisture
content it with the look-up table. If it is in the range 0–100 then the sensor is in the
air, if the moisture content is in the range from 100 to 300 dry, if moisture content
ranges from 300 to 700 humid or optimal, if it ranges from 700 to 1000, it is excess.
A user/farmer can monitor their field by their preferred way no matter wherever
they are in the world if the user has their smartphone they can access the field data
(Fig. 8).
8 IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier … 107

Fig. 7 Graph of humidity

Fig. 8 Prototype mobile application

108 MD S. Ahmad and A. U. Zaman

5 Conclusion

This smart agriculture monitoring system was developed and tested to track the
current situation in the agriculture field in real time. This paper has described the
design and implementation of our IoT-based monitoring system. A device combined
with sensors node and a sink node, a server, and a smartphone application is used
for this system. In this work, the field data monitoring device is a composition of
a microcontroller, GSM module, Bluetooth module, SD card module, and various
sensors to acquire data from an agriculture field and transmit it to a server through
GSM network. On the other end, the Web interface written in PHP is implemented
to connect to a database directly. And a smartphone application has been developed
to display all the data. Furthermore, this implementation is low cost (approximately
40$–50$ for each node) and easily accessible.

References

1. Al-Fuqaha A, Guizani M, Mohammadi M, Aledhari M, Ayyash M (2015) Internet of things:

a survey on enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor
17(4):2347–2376. (Fourth quarter 2015)
2. Pimentel D, Berger B, Filiberto D, Newton M, Wolfe B, Karabinakis E, Clark S, Poon E, Abbett
E, Nandagopal S (2004) Water resources: agricultural and environmental issues. Bioscience
54(10):909–918
3. Kim Y, Evans RG, Iversen WM (2008) Remote sensing and control of an irrigation system
using a distributed wireless sensor network. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 57(7):1379–1387
4. Gutiérrez J, Villa-Medina JF, Nieto-Garibay A, PortaGándara MÁ (2014) Automated ırriga-
tion system using a wireless sensor network and GPRS module. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas
63(1):166–176
5. Zhao JC, Zhang JF, Feng Y, Guo JX (2010) The study and application of the IOT technology
in agriculture. In: 2010 3rd International conference on computer science and ınformation
technology. Chengdu, pp 462–465
6. Liu Y, Zhang C, Zhu P (2011) The temperature humidity monitoring system of soil based on
wireless sensor networks. In: 2011 International conference on electric ınformation and control
engineering. Wuhan, pp 1850–1853
7. Ivanov S, Bhargava K, Donnelly W (2015) Precision farming: sensor analytics. IEEE Intell
Syst 30(4):76–80. (July–Aug 2015)
8. Ammad-udin M, Mansour A, Le Jeune D, Aggoune EHM, Ayaz M (2016) UAV routing protocol
for crop health management. In: 2016 24th European signal processing conference (EUSIPCO).
Budapest, pp 1818–1822
9. Lottes P, Khanna R, Pfeifer J, Siegwart R, Stachniss C (2017) UAV-based crop and weed classi-
fication for smart farming. In: 2017 IEEE ınternational conference on robotics and automation
(ICRA). pp 30243031
10. Akyildiz IF, Melodia T, Chowdury KR (2007) Wireless multimedia sensor networks: a survey.
IEEE Wirel Commun 14(6):32–39
11. Liu H, Meng Z, Cui S (2017) A wireless sensor network prototype for environmental monitoring
in greenhouses. In IEEE national high-tech R&D program, demonstration and research of
wireless sensor network applications for agriculture
12. Mat I, Kassim MRM, Harun AN, Yusoff IM (2016) IoT in precision agriculture applications
using wireless moisture sensor network. In IEEE conference on open systems (ICOS). (10–12
Oct 2016)
 8 IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Monitoring System with Double-Tier … 109

13. Athani S, Tejeshwar CH, Patil P, Patil MM, Kulkarni R (2017) Soil moisture monitoring using
IoT enabled Arduino sensors with neural networks for improving soil management for farmers
and predict seasonal rainfall for planning future harvest in North Karnataka-India. International
conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC 2017)
14. Arduino Nano. https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-nano. Accessed 11 May 2019

View publication stats