Agricultural Irrigation Control using Sensor-enabled Architecture

Cloud-based architectures for precision agriculture are domain-specific controlled and require remote access to process and analyze the collected data over third-party cloud computing platforms. Due to the dynamic changes in agricultural parameters and restrictions in terms of accessing cloud platforms, developing a locally controlled and real-time configured architecture is crucial for efficient water irrigation and farmers management in agricultural fields. Thus, we present a new implementation of an independent sensor-enabled architecture using variety of wireless-based sensors to capture soil moisture level, amount of supplied water, and compute the reference evapotranspiration (ETo). Both parameters of soil moisture content and ETo values was then used to manage the amount of irrigated water in a small-scale agriculture field for 356 days. We collected around 34,200 experimental data samples to evaluate the performance of the architecture under different agriculture parameters and conditions, which have significant influence on realizing real-time monitoring of agricultural fields. In a proof of concept, we provide empirical results that show that our architecture performs favorably against the cloud-based architecture, as evaluated on collected experimental data through different statistical performance models. Experimental results demonstrate that the architecture has potential practical application in a many of farming activities, including water irrigation management and agricultural condition control.