Name: Aditya
Id: 18B81A0467
Section: ECE-B, 4th year
IoT Assignment
IOT BASED GREENHOUSE
MONITORING SYSTEM
ABSTRACT
The wireless sensor network (WSN) is one of the most significant
technologies in the 21st century and they are very suitable for distributed data
collecting and monitoring in tough environments such as greenhouses. The other
most significant technologies in the 21st century is the Internet of Things (IoT)
which has rapidly developed covering hundreds of applications in the civil, health,
military and agriculture areas. In modern greenhouses, several measurement
points are required to trace down the local climate parameters in different parts of
a large scale greenhouse in order to ensure proper operation of the greenhouse
automation system. Cabling would make the measurement system expensive,
vulnerable and also difficult to relocate once installed. This paper presents
a WSN prototype consisting of MicaZ nodes which are used to measure
greenhouses’ temperature, light, pressure and humidity. Measurement data have
been shared with the help of IoT. With this system farmers can control their
greenhouse from their mobile phones or computers which have internet
connection.
INTRODUCTION
The most important factors for the quality and productivity of plant growth
are temperature, humidity and light. Continuous monitoring of these
environmental variables provides valuable information to the grower to better
understand, how each factor affects growth and how to maximize crop
productiveness. The optimal greenhouse micro climate adjustment can enable us
to improve productivity and to achieve remarkable energy savings especially
during the winter in northern countries2 . WSN, composed of hundreds of nodes
which have ability of sensing, actuation and communicating, has great
advantages in terms of high accuracy, fault tolerance, flexibility, cost, autonomy
and robustness compared to wired ones. Moreover, with the onset of IoT and
M2M communications, it is poised to become a very significant enabling
technology in many sectors, like military, environment, health, home and other
commercial areas3 . IoT is a general term, covering a number of technologies
that allows devices to communicate with each other, with or without human
intervention. An example application, presented in this paper, is the MicaZ node
based greenhouse application, which in a timely manner provides a possibility for
screen monitoring of detailed data about the conditions of the greenhouse.
Furthermore, the suggested setup can be incorporated with other internet and
messaging services (i.e. Web, WAP, SMS) to provide communication for farmers.
System Description
System architecture
In the literature there are numerous examples of versatile IoT application
oriented studies. In 4, an example of control networks and information
networks integration with IoT technology has been studied based on an
actual situation of agricultural production. A remote monitoring system with
combining internet and wireless communications is proposed. Furthermore,
taking into account the system, an additional information management sub-
system is designed. The collected data is provided in a form suitable for
agricultural research facilities.
A conceptual view of the system is presented in Fig. 1. The data of
the greenhouse readings are transmitted wirelessly from routing nodes to a
central monitoring system (the base station). Depending on the node’s
distance from the base station, messages can pass through multiple nodes to
reach the base station. The base station is connected to a host computer
running MoteView to interpret, store and display the collected data. There are
three main subsystems involved: wireless network structure, data
measurement subsystem and the base station with its graphical interface.
This wireless communication platform uses MicaZ wireless motes
programmed in nesC and data transferred to a central database over
802.15.4 based wireless network. The performance of the implemented
network was tested based on different network topologies. XServe serves as
the primary gateway between the wireless networks and other applications.
At its core, XServe provides services to route data to and from the mesh
network with higher level services to parse, transform and process data as it
flows between the mesh and the outside applications.
FIG : remote monitoring system
Wireless Module
The MicaZ off-the-shelf wireless modules are used in this study. MicaZ
wireless modules are produced by Crossbow Inc. The MicaZ is a 2.4 GHz, IEEE
802.15.4 compliant, mote module used for enabling low-power wireless sensor
networks. The features include: IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee compliant, 2.4 GHz, a
globally compatible ISM band, direct sequence spread spectrum, security (AES-
128), 250 kbps data rate, runs TinyOS 1.1.7 and higher versions.
Software
TinyOS is an open-source operating system designed for wireless
embedded sensor networks. It features a component-based architecture, which
enables rapid innovation and implementation while minimizing code size as
required by the severe memory constraints inherent in sensor networks.
TinyOS’s component library includes network protocols, distributed services,
sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools—all of which can be used as-is or be
further refined for a custom application. TinyOS’s event-driven execution model
enables fine-grained power management and allows the scheduling flexibility
made necessary by the unpredictable nature of wireless communication and
physical world interfaces. Components have three computational concepts:
commands, events, tasks. Commands and events are mechanisms for inter-
component communication, while tasks are used to express intra-component
concurrency. The wireless modules are programmed with application-specific
TinyOS code using nesC programming language. It features a component-based
architecture, which enables rapid innovation and implementation while
minimizing code size as required by the severe memory constraints inherent in
sensor networks. TinyOS’s component library includes network protocols,
distributed services, sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools—all of which can
be used as-is or be further refined for a custom application. TinyOS’s event-
driven execution model enables fine-grained power management and allows the
scheduling flexibility made necessary by the unpredictable nature of wireless
communication and physical world interfaces. Components have three
computational concepts: commands, events, tasks.
Fig. Greenhouse IoT Software Modules
The modules comprising the IoT Software subsystem are presented in
Figure. Data is collected through sensors on the MicaZ modes. Collected
data is processed and transmitted to the MIB 250 Service Support Platform.
which is responsible for analysis and operation management. From there the
operation is handed down to the Greenhouse Monitoring System module
which is responsible for connections to the customer through the MoteView
interface or another IoT based Web/Mobile Customer interface. The web
application software its self includes three parts of user authentication, data
access, data query and download, which access the database through
[Link]. Thus the remote data acquisition can communicate with the
database through [Link]. Users have real-time access to data from the
web page7.
Experimental Results
The modes’ placement map and details about the distances between them
are given in Fig. 3a. Fig. 3b on the other hand gives the pictures taken from
the deployment site greenhouse where the project was tested. MicaZ motes
should be placed in the exact locations where measurements should be
made. As it can be seen from the pictures some of the nodes are placed on
wooden cases higher above the ground, while others are placed directly over
the soil. That is where the great advantage of this system being wireless
comes into play – it allows great flexibility and can easily be customized
according to the specific requirements of each individual farmer. As can be
seen from Fig. 3c., even if the specific placement of the motes is changed,
the designed networking protocol ensures that they will be connected into an
operating network, data successfully reach the sink MIB 250 and furthermore
transmissions will be made using minimum possible energy. In the
measurements taken all nodes were kept constant for each experiment and
an example of their connections is given in Fig.
Fig. 4. (a) Packets’ data information; (b) % Humidity vs. time;(c) Temparature (Celcius) vs. time;
(d) Light (Lux) vs. time (e) Pressure (atm) vs. time (f) Voltage (Volt) vs. time
The operation of the proposed networking protocol was evaluated in terms
of throughput: numbers of control packets (“health_pkts”), data packets
(node_pkts), forwarded packets, dropped as well as the number of retries and
the battery level. Detailed data is from the MoteView interface is summarized
in Fig.4a. The operation of the designed network platform, in terms
application data about the conditions in the greenhouse (humidity,
temperature, light, pressure and voltage level) as a function of time is
presented in the graphs in Fig. 4b – 4f.
Fig. 4b gives the percentage change in humidity as a function of time. The
application was started at 9:00 o’clock on 10.6.2016 and ran until 21:00,
11.6.2016. This means that it ran continuously for 36 hours. Each separate
color represents the data for a specific node. Color notations are the same for
all figures, however the color legend is given only in Fig. 4b to provide clarity
of the results. Similarly, Fig. 4c gives the temperature change (in Celsius),
Fig. 4d the change in light (in lux), Fig. 4e the change in pressure, Fig. 4f the
change in voltage of battery for the same period.
These experiments were carried out in Nazilli/ İsabeyli, Turkey. The second
day some of the doors of the greenhouse were open which resulted in some
rapid changes in the values recorded. Besides this there are no other
unexpected or inexplicable changes in the behavior of the designed system.
As a result we can state that the data collected is quite within expected range,
the values are changing with an expected trend and the designed network as
a whole is quite stable in its operation.
Conclusion
In this paper we have presented the results of an IoT based
experimental study from the area of agriculture. The designed system allows
precise position real time measurements and data transmission from the
greenhouse to the interested farmer. Using off-the shelf components (MicaZ
nodes) an original routing protocol was designed and incorporated in an IoT
based internet accessed agriculture application. All collected data can also be
stored on a computer and day/time based reports and graphics are
accessible for analysis at any time. The very specific data collection, easily
adjustable sensor positions and storage of data allows thorough analysis that
can reveal even the most intricate trends in the farming process, thus
directing the farmer how to improve the process for the next farming cycle.
Furthermore, the long term collected data can be used by agriculture
specialists to create more specific timetables and directions for growing
specific crops. From the communication point of view, the suggested system
provides a one-way flow of information – from the greenhouse to the end
user. In our future work we plan to extend the system to include actuators as
well, thus providing not only monitoring and data analysis but also precise
control for greenhouse farming.
