Proposal for the Design of Monitoring and Operating Irrigation Networks Based on IoT, Cloud Computing and Free Hardware Technologies

• Main Authors: Luis Manuel Fernández-Ahumada, Jose Ramírez-Faz, Marcos Torres-Romero, Rafael López-Luque
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: LPWAN; free hardware; sensor networks; IOT platform
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/10/2318

In recent decades, considerable efforts have been devoted to process automation in agriculture. Regarding irrigation systems, this demand has found several difficulties, including the lack of communication networks and the large distances to electricity supply points. With the recent implementation of LPWAN wireless communication networks (SIGFOX, LoraWan, and NBIoT), and the expanding market of electronic controllers based on free software and hardware (i.e., Arduino, Raspberry, ESP, etc.) with low energy requirements, new perspectives have appeared for the automation of agricultural irrigation networks. This paper presents a low-cost solution for automatic cloud-based irrigation. In this paper, it is proposed the design of a node network based on microcontroller ESP32-Lora and Internet connection through SIGFOX network. The results obtained show the stability and robustness of the designed system.