Cloud-based Internet of Things Approach for Smart Irrigation System: Design and Implementation

Water plays a significant role in the economic development of countries. The agriculture sector is the most water-consuming; this sector consumes 69% of the freshwater. However, farmers often use traditional irrigation systems to water their crops. These systems are ineffective and consume a IoT of time and effort, mainly when several fields are distributed in different geographical regions. Therefore, employing smart irrigation techniques will significantly overcome these problems. This paper proposes an intelligent irrigation framework based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) cloud services. The proposed system consists of three main components; the WSN, the control unit, and cloud services. Arduino Uno and XBee ZigBee modules are combined to gather sensors data and send them wirelessly to the control unit. YL-69 sensor is used to monitor the soil moisture. Raspberry Pi is utilized to gather data, process them, provide the proper decision, and transfer them to ThingSpeak IoT cloud. In the cloud, the data collected from the system is stored to create instance visualization of live data and send alerts. This allows farmers to monitor the status of crops and make the required decisions. After inspecting the prototype, many challenges are posed for future work.