Advances in Precision Agriculture through Edge and Cloud Computing
Authors/Creators
- 1. aDepartment of Computer Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Valencia, 46022 Valencia, Spain bInstituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial y Aplicaciones (I3A), University of Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza,
Description
Precision Agriculture (PA), as the integration of information, communication and control technologies in agriculture, is growing day by day. The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing paradigms offer advances to enhance PA connectivity. Nevertheless, their usage in this field is usually limited to specific scenarios of high cost, and they are not adapted to semi-arid conditions, or do not cover all PA management in an efficient way. For this reason, we propose a flexible platform able to cope with soilless culture needs in full recirculation greenhouses using moderately saline water. It is based on exchangeable low-cost hardware and supported by a three-tier open source software platform at local, edge and cloud planes. At the local plane, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) interact with crop devices to gather data and perform real-time atomic control actions. The edge plane of the platform is in charge of monitoring and managing main PA tasks near the access network to increase system reliability against network access failures. Finally, the cloud platform collects current and past records and hosts data analytics modules in a FIWARE deployment. IoT protocols like Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) or Constrained