Design and implementation of middleware for greenhouse based on ubiquitous sensor network

Abstract

The USN middleware technology is used to filter lots of duplicate data collected from many sensor networks and convert the raw data into meaningful information for users to send it to applications, and provides services to make users could decide contextual information quickly and correctly through the data mining technique and analysis method. Even though it has been presently carried out the studies on such a USN middleware to apply it for various fields such as administration, medicine, science, transportation, and logistics etc., there are very few studies on the middleware suitable to agricultural environment which applications of IT technology have not been sufficient relatively comparing to other industries. In particular, for controlled agriculture, there are many difficulties on user's decision-making for efficient crop production due to a number of environmental factors affecting crop production. In order to solve such problems, this paper is trying to propose a USN middleware suitable to agricultural environment, which could collect greenhouse's environmental information and optimally manage crops through facility automation. The proposed middleware is composed of a sensor manager, context manager and control manager, which collects a variety of data from heterogeneous sensor networks, processes the collected data into information suitable to user's demand, and sends it to controllers of controlled agriculture, so that it could support users to be provided various application services and make decisions adequate to conditions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.