Energy-Efficient Edge-Fog-Cloud Architecture for IoT-Based Smart Agriculture Environment

The current agriculture systems compete to take advantage of industry advanced technologies, including the internet of things (IoT), cloud/fog/edge computing, artificial intelligence, and agricultural robots to monitor, track, analyze and process various functions and services in real-time. Additionally, these technologies can make the agricultural processes smarter and more cost-efficient by using automated systems and eliminating any human interventions, hence enhancing agricultural production to meet future expectations. Although the current agriculture systems that adopt the traditional cloud-based architecture have provided powerful computing infrastructure to distributed IoT sensors. However, the cost of energy consumption associated with transferring heterogeneous data over the multiple network tiers to process, analyze and store the sensor's information in the cloud has created a huge load on information and communication infrastructure. Besides, the energy consumed by cloud data centers has an environmental impact associated with using non-clean fuels, which usually release carbon emissions (CO
₂
) to produce electricity. Thus, to tackle these issues, we propose a new integrated edge-fog-cloud architectural paradigm that promises to enhance the energy-efficient of smart agriculture systems and corresponding carbon emissions. This architecture allows data collection from several sensors to process and analyze the agriculture data that require real-time operation (e.g., weather temperature, soil moisture, soil acidity, irrigation, etc.) in several layers (edge, fog, and cloud). Thus, the real-time processing could be held by the edge and fog layers to reduce the load on the cloud layer, which will help to enhance the overall energy consumption and process the agriculture applications/services efficiently. Mathematical modeling is conducted using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) for a smart agriculture environment, where the proposed architecture is implemented, and results are analyzed and compared to the traditional implementation. According to the results of thousands of agriculture sensors, the proposed architecture outperforms the traditional cloud-based architecture in terms of reducing the overall energy consumption by 36% and the carbon emissions by 43%. In addition to these achievements, the results show that our proposed architecture can reduce network traffic by up to 86%, which can reduce network congestion. Finally, we develop a heuristic algorithm to validate and mimic the presented approach, and it shows comparable results to the MILP model.