Testing Topology Adaptive Irrigation IoT with Circuits

There is a significant unrealized potential in developing state of the art electronics for agriculture, particularly, for irrigation systems. However, development velocity in the domain of Irrigation Internet of Things (IrIoT) is slowed due to lengthy and complex validation cycles that require multi domain integration testing. This paper proposes testing IrIoT distributed controllers on electrical circuit platform prior to final verification. This flexible testing environment utilizes wires as opposed to water lines for testing design shortcomings. To fully expose challenges associated with next generation IrIoT this paper discusses testing challenges of topology adaptive distributed wireless irrigation controllers. Here are presented contributions in topology adaptation method, software simulation tools, an intermediate testing step using circuits as opposed to directly conducting integration testing in the target setting. The proposed method establishes an isolated circuit sandbox where integral system components, in this case IrIoT controllers, and algorithms are tested prior to full integration testing.