IIoT Based Multimodal Communication Model for Agriculture and Agro-Industries

The population would reach ten billion by 2050, and experts believe that the agricultural sector needs to boost production by 70% to satisfy the demand. Traditional farming practices rely on primitive technology that creates a yield gap with low productivity. A paradigm shift towards merging new technologies in the agriculture sector would enhance productivity, optimize cost, and encourage sustainable development. In this paper, we review the necessity for the fusion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technological approach in the agricultural domain. We discuss the gap in supply chain management for the Industrial sector and Agricultural sector and identify the issues of vendor-specific production systems. We propose a multimodal communication model for the systematic integration of multi-vendor agricultural production systems. Our model utilizes the Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware to enable communication between heterogeneous production systems to perform farming operations in a coordinated manner. Experimental work is conducted on a small-scale hydroponic farm to evaluate the system performance in terms of throughput, latency, and packet delivery ratio (PDR). The throughput for our proposed DDS system has significantly improved with the use of the BATCH QoS policy for payload size less than 1024 bytes. However, we incur an average latency of approximately 235 microseconds for any payload size. The value of PDR is 1 for any payload size ensuring our system to be reliable. The results suggest that our model can enable interoperability between multi-vendor production systems in real-time while incurring minimum latency.