Smart Rural Framework Using IoT Devices and Cloud Computing

Increased energy consumption and Carbon Dioxide levels have led to climate change, which has a wide variety of adverse effects on human health. The effects are apparent in the gaseous concentrations within the air that we breathe, rapidly changing weather conditions, and declining quality of agriculture. These effects are evident in the state of Louisiana, where agricultural concerns are paramount and natural disasters including flooding are consistently of concern. In this paper, we propose a Smart Rural Framework to mitigate the effects of climate change using Internet of Things and the Cloud, building a prototype on Louisiana Tech University campus. Our design combines sensor nodes, that uses low-power microprocessors, with the Cloud, on which higher processing power and larger storage capability are available, to envision an informative and reliable web dashboard to visualize the information collected from the sensor nodes. Smart Rural Framework uses Libelium Waspmote as sensor nodes, Meshlium as a Fog server, and Amazon Web Services as the preferred cloud service and DynamoDB as a cloud datastore. The use of low-power idling mode in the sensor nodes, the low-energy 802.15.4 wireless protocol, and cloud computing have proved to make the Smart Rural Framework a green technology. Our results show that the Smart Rural Framework can monitor and regulate battery power usage and the readings can be expressed to users in an intuitive fashion.