The Future of Agricultural Production using IoT along with Cloud Computing in Pakistan: A Survey

(Draft-2)

Abstract

IoT and Cloud Computing are both novel and revolutionary technologies. There are three main hurdles in increasing in production weather, disease and insect damage. This survey discussed the prevention of these hurdles using these technologies. Data collected from IoT sensor network consisted on (GPS, WIFI, NPK, Humidity, P.H. and Temperature) sensors and some necessary information from farmers about known diseases and insects attack in particular weather, would be stored on the cloud as historical data. This historical data could be used to predict the best-suited crop on the basis weather also provide the best combination of fertilizer and pesticides for that particular crop for better production and massive resistance against diseases to farmers.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, IoT, Sensor Network

1. Introduction

South Asian countries are rich in agricultural products because the history of agriculture is too deep in this region. Agriculture began by 9000 BCE in this region, especially in north-west India [1]. In 1947 the partitioning of Subcontinent divided agriculture into two parts Indian and Pakistani agriculture. The population of both countries around 70% belongs to the agricultural occupation. Agriculture is known to be the backbone of the economy of Pakistan in major crops [2]. Agriculture of Pakistan contributes to around 18.9% of the GDP and employs about 42.3% of the labour force [3]. Two provinces of Pakistan (Punjab and Sindh) produce most of its agricultural products. Especially Punjab is working on advancements of agricultural processes to replace old traditional production methods. Agriculture in Punjab employs 40% of the labour force and has a contribution to Punjab’s GDP, around 27%, which provides a vital foundation to Punjab’s economy. About 23,000 villages in Punjab occupying 28 million acres of cultivatable land, having 5.2 million farming families [4]. Agricultural production is deficient in Pakistan compared to developed countries like China, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The reason for low production is the adaption of old traditional farming methods followed by more former. Smart agriculture now becomes more prevalent in advanced countries due to low cost and an increase in production. Two significant technologies, Cloud Computing and IoT sensor networks are the backbones of the smart agriculture system.

The word Internet of Things (IoT) made from two words, “Internet” and “Things.” IoT’s are sensors and actuators used for monitoring and controlling daily life activities and machines using over the internet. After one year, the invention of the World Wide Web (internet) in 1990, John Romkey connect Toaster with the internet [5]. The name IoT was first used in 1999 by Kevin Ashton when the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) experimented to helps computers to identify specific things [6]. IoT has revolutionized every field of life in these days smart things like smart card, smart home, and much more are dependent on IoT’s. IoT sensors and actuators are now using in medical field great example is vent letter that provides excellent support to doctors to realtime monitor a patient. The network performance increases with the improvement of technology and network protocol usage of IoT increases. All the IoT equipment for agricultural purposes is available now the critical question is how to use and deploy them in the field? For providing an effective solution to farmers. For this purpose, researchers did a lot of work on it which is discussed below in this study. It is necessary to obtain a better and cheaper solution for agriculture, cloud computing required with IoT.

The term “Cloud Computing” was first used in 1996 and used by Amazon in the form of their product Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 [7]. Cloud computing means computing resources are available through the internet. A user needs an internet connection and service (storage, gaming, software, etc.) form a cloud service provider. In these days’ computation has become faster than past computers. It isn’t easy to maintain extensive data for an organization individually for this purpose they purchase services from the cloud services provider. The organization have to pay for his services, to preserve data and maintain resources is the service provider headache of the service provider. The cloud services provider provides services using these models infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) depending on user need.

In smart farming, both IoT and Cloud Computing technologies are useful to make farming smart. Using IoT based smart farming system, it is easy to explore nutrients of the soil and treat soil according to IoT based collected data. IoT based smart farming systems could save electricity, fertilizers and pesticides that could cause a decrease in cost and increase in production. Smart farming solutions stored and analyzed on the cloud could be helpful in future. There are some deficiencies of smart farming availability of internet in remote areas, accuracy in prediction of weather (natural phenomenon), expensiveness of smart farming infrastructure and farmers knowledge about these novel systems. Researchers are still working on solving these problems related to the usage of IoT on slow internet and reducing the risks associated with weather prediction and IoT equipment. This survey will compare all smart agriculture systems developed based on IoT and Cloud Computing.

In the introduction, the first section is about the agriculture history and production in Pakistan, second and section covered the history of IoT and Cloud Computing and in the third section included the use of both technologies in agriculture also discussed with pros and cons.

2. Motivation & Background

As a farmer, I also faced a few problems as I am going to discuss in this survey. In past lack of advancement in technology, we lost most of the production during cultivation and few of this during planting and harvesting due to weather impact and insect attack. Now, these days everything is there in the market to monitor a crop and weather prediction system. This information is enough to choose the right crop for cultivation.

3. Problem Statement

There are three main hurdles in increasing in production weather, disease and insect damage. All these hurdles are possible to cross using this technology. There is no database exist to store information for future use. Set of problems provide a set of solutions, in the absence of the system we lost most of the production every year.

4. Research Objectives

The objective of this survey is to provide a solution that can help to get the right information from a cultivated area and give a correct and most effective crop production along with fertilizer quantity, disease prevention and possible insect killer pesticides for that area.

5. Research Contribution (Expected outcomes, the significance of study or rationale)

The outcome of this will remove the hesitation among farmers that what could be cultivated for better production.

6. Research Methodology

A machine would be developed based on IoT based wireless sensor network which collects the realtime data and stored on the cloud also displayed on the android mobile app. According to data solution would be sent to the user in his mobile app.

7. Literature Review

Sunil and Jadoun, in their article, says that cloud computing is a more effective technique for agricultural areas in Bharat. Instead of buying new expensive software, hardware, and extensive infrastructure and resources with too many employees, cloud base services are easy to use, maintainable and easily accessible because it is a network-based environment. To centralize agricultural–related database including (weather, crop, research, soil–related, fertilizers, agriculture marketing and pesticides information) cloud computing is helpful to manage this database.

In this article, the author discussed some computing models like Desktop Computing, Client Server Computing, Cluster Computing, Grid Computing and Cloud Computing also deployment of cloud computing. Also, they discussed models of cloud computing SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with their pros and cons. By using cloud computing services, small and large region farmers can get advantages from this technology. Sharing knowledge on cloud helps to improve agricultural growth, food, grain, ensure food safety, product and GDP of the nation [8].

Rakesh and Mili describe in their article that real Indian faces are Indian villagers and they are future of their country from partitioning the rural Indian are ignored. By the implementation of cloud, Technologies bring a significant change in their life advanced agriculture shade on cloud improve their economy and income of the country.  ICT Technologies are emerging Technologies in my areas.   But the use of cloud computing ICT Technology the users do not need to know the physical location of infrastructure. The technology faster efficient, reliable and user-friendly and cheaper ICT tool for agriculture field.  In this study, a model proposes that it have two significant parts first part is focusing on monitoring and fulfilling the user requirements with the help of faster and user-friendly approaches (demand-supply, communication and communicating devices). The second part is the centralization of data Bank (crop-related information, monitoring weather, soil information, growth progress, export consultation and farmer related).

By implementing this model, data of farmers and expert opinion can be accessed anywhere anytime, and the economy of the country improve.  This will put a positive impact on the national economic situation [9].

Patel and his colleague say, that in Revolutionary Technologies IoT is one of them, that Express the future of communication and computation.  They are proposing a wisdom-based system, which focuses on IoT, including WSN, RFID, geomatics, sensor Technology, and cloud computing. According to the study, the proposed system should meet the following requirements (robust models, scalability, affordability and sustainability). They also discussed the Datang Model China (structure of IoT for agriculture which is based on three layers.

1. Sensor layer
2. Network layer
3. application layer

According to this study data collected with IoT and processed via cloud computing will get more accurate situation also the agricultural product of a single farmer could be delivered to marketing shops of the full area. There will improve the supply and demand chain of the country. Producer and consumers can directly contact with each other everywhere anytime from the world. Cloud computing provides all necessary services to farmers in rural areas at an affordable cost [10].

Nurzaman and Debashis say that agricultural domain and smart farming get the dimensional area from IoT. According to this study with the use of WiFi–based long–distance network in IoT (Internet of Things) and fog computing, it is easy to connect farming basis and agriculture in rural areas more effectively and efficiently. The proposed system will be able to monitor and weather and soil quality, farm, manage irrigation, pest and scientific disease, controlled use of fertilizers, movement of cattle monitoring, asset tracking and remote control and diagnosis. The writer of this article proposed routing and MAC solution for IoT to achieve better delay, energy and throughput performance. The proposed solution would also be used in other fields, like healthcare effectively [11].

Sahitya and her colleagues discussed in this article about AgroTick System proposed in this article. The main idea of AgroTick System based on IoT (Internet of Things) that supports the mobile interface. The primary AgroTick System designed with emerging technologies modules like embedded firmware, hardware unit, cloud computing and big data analysis.

The proposed AgroTick System invented to improve the efficiency of agriculture. This is done by IoT based sensor network which collects the Realtime data from farms and stored on the cloud for further analysis. After data analysis smart solution shared with farmers and experts for feedback using the mobile application which is developed in different regional languages, so that more farmers can visit and remain in touch with the system throughout the world. The current system will modernize the agricultural system in India [12].

Gayatri and his colleagues discussed that cloud computing is one of the modern technologies that put old businesses on a new route. They proposed a system in which IoT and cloud computing are two significant technologies. A knowledge-based system is built on these technologies that provide smart solutions to on–field farmers according to their problems. In this article system discussed is so intelligent enough, which can automatically irrigate crop when it required water in the absence of farmer by keeping in mind weather condition. Also, the system can schedule the next plant could be automatically flooded according to the water requirement of that particular crop.

The system can give access to those farmers who are registered on the system by providing some necessary details. The system will intelligently categorize these farmers based on their farming activity (cattle or farm, etc.). A GPS based system automatically detects the location of farmers and provide the solution according to their locality. A system scans the cattle and extract his type, breed and give the milking capacity based on parameters scanned. All this work is done based on IoT, which exhibits the importance of IoT [13].

Sukhpal and Rajkumar, in their article, says that IoT and Cloud Services are emerging technologies. These technologies can play a vital role in today agriculture system. In this article, they discussed that agriculture is an extensive business and have a comprehensive dataset (weather reports, crops, cattle and soil images) taken on every second can take too much space on the repository. The existing traditional storage technologies are not able to handle this vast dataset. To overcome this situation, they proposed AaaS (Agriculture as a Service) idea based on a cloud platform. To manage the above problem, they offered the following steps to implement the system.

1. They are gathering data from various devices using IoT sensors.
2. Using analysis techniques classify the gathered data.
3. Classified data will be stored on repositories for future use.

Using cloud services, a user can access this dataset for getting better solutions making sure by providing QoS (quality of services) to their users.

In this proposed system, AaaS K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm is used for classification to provide the best relevant solution to farmers. The system could intelligently handle the resources of the cloud. This system performs better in terms of cost, latency, execution time, security, resource utilization and latency in experiments. Hopefully, this system will be the future of modern agriculture [14].

Shareef and Visvanathan say in this article that IoT is a revolutionary technology that supports and represents the communications and computing future. Most of the world population relies on agriculture; their income and food come from this field. Over time agriculture became advanced as other fields of everyday life. However, the speed of advancement is prolonged. In some countries, people are still using traditional old farming methods. In this author says that by adopting new technologies, we can control the monitoring performance, maintenance and cost.

Realtime images of some areas can express important information about that area. For getting realtime information of crops precision agriculture sensor network for monitoring could be used to collect soil, P.H., temperature, humidity, water level and soil nutrition level. In this article, authors are also discussing that technology is so advanced enough that farmers can monitor their crops using the internet and mobile devices. This article is focusing on a survey to get information about IoT based implemented systems for agriculture. The world should take advantage of IoT in irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide for pest control. IoT’s are smart, low cost and low energy consumption devices [15].

In this article, Meonghum and his colleagues found that to stabilize supply and demand chain of agricultural products and IoT based production system is a possible solution. There are some unpredictable factors which are not same in different areas weather change, disease and insect damage. These factors significantly affect the supply and demand chain. By harvesting statistics using proposed IoT based monitoring system, the efficiency of decision making could be improved. The proposed system worked as follow:

1. Information collects using IoT.
2. Information process specialization
3. Services portal for information

Collecting information from sensors will be analyzed by agriculture professionals, and they suggest the best solution which will be further monitor by Government professionals using GUI based portal. This system will help to monitor the supply and demand chain [16].

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_South_Asia#cite_ref-gupta54_2-0
2. Rehman, Abdul; Jingdong, Luan; Shahzad, Babar; Chandio, Abbas Ali; Hussain, Imran; Nabi, Ghulam; Iqbal, Muhammad Shahid (2015-11-01). “Economic perspectives of major field crops of Pakistan: An empirical study.” Pacific Science Review B: Humanities and Social Sciences. 1 (3): 145–158
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Pakistan
4. https://tribune.com.pk/story/1353599/smart-agriculture-beyond/
5. John Romkey (2017). “Toast of the IoT: The 1990 Interop Internet Toaster.” IEEE. 1 (6): 116-119
6. Ashton, K. (22 June 2009). “That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing.”
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#cite_note-13
8. Sushil Kumar Choudhary, R. J. (2016). Role of Cloud Computing Technology in Agriculture Fields. ResearchGate, 7.
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12. Roy, D. R. (2017). IoT, Big Data Science & Analytics, Cloud Computing and Mobile App based Hybrid System for Smart Agriculture. (p. 2). IEEE.
13. K.Gayatri, J. D. (2015). Providing Smart Agricultural Solutions to Farmers for better yielding using IoT. (p. 4). IEEE.
14. Sukhpal Singh Gill, I. C. (2017). IoT Based Agriculture as a Cloud and Big Data Service: The Beginning of Digital India. ResearchGate, 23.
15. Mohammad Shareef Mekala, D. P. (2017). A Survey: Smart Agriculture IoT with Cloud Computing. (p. 7). IEEE.
16. Meonghun Lee, J. H. (2013). Agricultural Production System based on IoT. (p. 5). IEEE.