A smart lighting system for greenhouses based on Narrowband-IoT communication

With the advance and popularity of communication technologies and the Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) becomes one of the most popular technologies in recent decade. IoT are applied to various applications, such as health care, smart home and environmental monitoring in our daily life. Three short-range communication technologies, Bluetooth, WiFi and ZigBee are widely used in IoT devices but along with short transmission range, middle power consumption and weakness of interference. Hence, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) for the cellular network are proposed for wide coverage, lower power consumption and massive devices with reliable communication for IoT devices. Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) is highly valued by the industry for its reliable connection, optimal network topology, low latency, low power consumption and low construction cost.Due to rapid changes in climate, demands on environmental monitoring for various applications, such as animal migration and greenhouse of high-cost crops are increased. In this paper, a prototype of smart lighting system based on Narrowband-IoT communication is proposed for connecting the back-end system and fields such as outdoor greenhouses or street lights. In the testbed, the dimming of the light is scheduled and controlled as well as monitoring the environmental temperature and humidity of the field. Experimental results are shown to verify usabilities and advantages applying Narrowband-IoT to the smart lighting system.