Smart Irrigation System for Precision Agriculture—The AREThOU5A IoT Platform

Agriculture 4.0, as the future of farming technology, includes several key enabling technologies towards sustainable agriculture. The use of state-of-the-art technologies, such as the Internet of Things, transform traditional cultivation practices, like irrigation, to modern solutions of precision agriculture. In this paper, we present in detail the subsystems and the architecture of an intelligent irrigation system for precision agriculture, the AREThOU5A IoT platform. We describe the operation of the IoT node that is utilized in the platform. Moreover, we apply the radiofrequency energy harvesting technique to the presented IoT platform, as an alternative technique to deliver power to the IoT node of the platform. To this end, we fabricate and validate a rectenna module for radiofrequency energy harvesting. Experimental results of the fabricated rectenna exhibit a satisfactory performance as a harvester of ambient sources in an outdoor environment.