The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the agriculture industry and enables farmers to deal with the vast challenges in the industry. Internet of Farming (IoF) applications increases the quantity, quality, sustainability as well as cost effectiveness of agricultural production. Farmers leverage IoF to monitor remotely, sensors that can detect soil moisture, crop growth and livestock feed levels, manage and control remotely the smart connected harvesters and irrigation equipment, and utilize artificial intelligence based tools to analyze operational data combined with 3rd party information, such as weather services, to provide new insights and improve decision making. The Internet of Farming relies on data gathered from sensor of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The WSN requires a reliable connectivity to provide accurate prediction of the farming system. This chapter proposes a strategy that provides always best connectivity (ABC). The strategy considers a routing protocol to support Low-power and lossy networks (LLN), with a minimum energy usage. Two scenarios are presented.
TopIntroduction
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technique provides a new method for access to farmland information technique (Jiao et al., 2013). IoT is the expansion of communication network and internet application, which is a technique to sense the physical world by sensing technology and the intelligent devices through the interconnection, calculation, processing and knowledge mining to achieve the information exchange and seamless links among the persons and devices or among the things and to achieve real-time control of the physical world, accurate management and scientific decision-making (Morais et al., 2008; Wei et al., 2010; Zang et al., 2007)
Internet of Farming (IoF) is the other extreme that lies in the scheme of the Internet of Things (ioT), where intelligent device networks truly belong to the Internet just like any other network. There are applications that will be accessible by the Internet community. Any Internet user/farmer will have access to the information provided by intelligent devices such as telemetry either by directly accessing the device or by means of intermediate servers. There are already very simple forms of Internet access to intelligent devices and the number of these applications will continue to grow. The connectivity model will likely have intermediate servers. The servers will collect data from smart devices and the Internet will connect to these servers, as opposed to the intelligent device, to preserve scarce resources in intelligent device networks and increase scalability.
Smart agriculture and precision farming are taking off, however, could just be the precursors to even greater use of technology in the farming world. BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, predicts that IoT device installations in the agriculture world will increase from 30 million in 2015 to 75 million in 2020, for a compound annual growth rate of 20%. Given all of the potential benefits of these IoT applications in agriculture, it is understandable that farmers are increasingly turning to agricultural drones and sensors for the future of farming.
The future of farming is in collecting and analyzing big data in agriculture in order to maximize efficiency. But there are far more trends to understand with the IoT, and the Internet of Things will touch many more industries than just farming.
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices that use sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These autonomous devices, known as routers and end nodes, combine with a gateway to create a typical WSN system. The distributed measurement nodes communicate wirelessly to a central gateway, which acts as the network coordinator in charge of node authentication, message buffering, and bridging from the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless network to the wired Ethernet network. Thus, the measurement data can be collected, processed, analyzed, and presented.
Therefore, this chapter initially aims at providing a brief survey on the state of the art in always best connected network concepts and network selection techniques as proposed for Internet of Farming infrastructures. The target behind this survey is to provide a reader with the basic mind-set regarding the design and deployment of always best connected (ABC) methodologies in IoF-specific scenarios. Hence, via this comprehensive survey the chapter targets at enlightening the reader on the applicability of ABC techniques for the IoF scenery as well as to pinpoint on how each proposed methodology from the literature was formulated in order to meet IoF-specific requirements. Nonetheless, in order to facilitate an even more robust understanding to the general audience with respect to the usage of network selection problems, this chapter is also dedicated at presenting a case study regarding an exemplar ABC and network selection technique employed within a controlled experimental IoF test-bed. In particular, the demonstrated ABC approach is mainly concerned with the ABC domain, particularly for the IoF-WSN. The backbone of this technique is derived by the properties of the quality of services (QoS) as well as quality of experience QoE) of nodes and users algorithm within an IoF infrastructure.