AgriSens: IoT-Based Dynamic Irrigation Scheduling System for Water Management of Irrigated Crops

In this article, we present the design of an Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based dynamic irrigation scheduling system (AgriSens) for efficient water management of irrigated crop fields. The AgriSens provides real time, automatic, dynamic as well as remote manual irrigation treatment for different growth phases of a crop's life cycle using IoT. A low-cost water-level sensor is designed to measure the level of water present in a field. We propose an algorithm for automatic dynamic-cum-manual irrigation based on farmer requirements. The AgriSens has a farmer-friendly user interface, which provides field information to the farmers in a multimodal manner - visual display, cell phone, and Web portal. It achieves significant results with respect to different performance metrics, such as data validation, packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and failure rate in various climatic conditions and with dynamic irrigation treatments. Experimental results show that the AgriSens helps improve the crop productivity by at most 10.21% over the traditional manual irrigation method, expands the network's lifetime 2.5 times more than the existing system yet achieving a reliability of 94% even after 500 h of operation.