IoT-Enabled Precision Agriculture: Developing an Ecosystem for Optimized Crop Management

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize agriculture by providing real-time data on crop and livestock conditions. This study aims to evaluate the performance scalability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in agriculture, specifically in two scenarios: monitoring olive tree farms and stables for horse training. The study proposes a new classification approach of IoT in agriculture based on several factors and introduces performance assessment metrics for stationary and mobile scenarios in 6LowPAN networks. The study utilizes COOJA, a realistic WSN simulator, to model and simulate the performance of the 6LowPAN and Routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) in the two farming scenarios. The simulation settings for both fixed and mobile nodes are shared, with the main difference being node mobility. The study characterizes different aspects of the performance requirements in the two farming scenarios by comparing the average power consumption, radio duty cycle, and sensor network graph connectivity degrees. A new approach is proposed to model and simulate moving animals within the COOJA simulator, adopting the random waypoint model (RWP) to represent horse movements. The results show the advantages of using the RPL protocol for routing in mobile and fixed sensor networks, which supports dynamic topologies and improves the overall network performance. The proposed framework is experimentally validated and tested through simulation, demonstrating the suitability of the proposed framework for both fixed and mobile scenarios, providing efficient communication performance and low latency. The results have several practical implications for precision agriculture by providing an efficient monitoring and management solution for agricultural and livestock farms. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the performance scalability of WSNs in the agriculture sector, offering a new classification approach and performance assessment metrics for stationary and mobile scenarios in 6LowPAN networks. The results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework for precision agriculture, providing efficient communication performance and low latency.