IoT Based Sustainable Management of Plant Light Requirements in Vertical Farming

This paper studies the use of interconnected wireless microcontrollers in a master-slave configuration to manage the light requirements of plants produced in a multi-compartment vertical farm. The master device is responsible for the remote monitoring and control of the vertical farm whereas the slaves devices are responsible for the direct control of the plant growth conditions in the growth compartments. This configuration allows a precise distributed control and a real-time monitoring of the plant requirements in each compartment to support the decision making. The microcontrollers are connected through 6LowPAN technology and the packets transmission is managed by RPL routing protocol which was tested with different objective functions, one of them is newly proposed in this article. The network was evaluated based on its data transfer quality, its energy consumption, and its use in the proposed light management system in vertical farms.