IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021 - 67

Table 1. FarmFox Testing Parameters.
Parameter
Area of each
subfields
Number of sensor
nodes
Figure 5. Graphical representation of sensed data.
(a) Graph for pH. (b) Graph for soil moisture.
(c) Graph for temperature. (d) Graph for turbidity.
data analysis and implementation of other statistical
and machine learning techniques become
much easier.
Data Transmission
The data transmission part is achieved
through the following steps.
Localized Communication We use IEEE
802.11 b/g/n protocol generally known as Wi-Fi to
establish localized communication between sensor
nodes and IoT gateway. The ESP-01S receives
the Wi-Fi signal from the nearby data collecting
center CIET budbud campus. Time Division Multiplexing
Access is used to make collision-free data
transmission among sensor nodes within the gateway.
We keep themicrocontroller active as it operates
in ultralow-power along with the ESP01S,
which is kept at sleep mode during the collection
of data andinactivemodeduringthe transmission
of the data to the sink node. The sleep mode and
active mode are achieved using RTC, which makes
power-hungry sensor nodes energy efficient.
Remote Communication Remote communication
for FarmFox is established using two servers:
a) repository server and b) web server.
Repository Server
The gateway node from each monitoring area
establishes a connection with the remote repository
data server using the Wi-Fi protocol. For the
processing of data, the server extracts the meaningful
information from the incoming packets and
the sensed raw data are calibrated. Thingspeak is
the repository cloud server that collects the data
from the sensor and represents it in a graphical format.
Figure 5(a)-(c) exhibits a steady growing
July/August 2021
Sensing interval
Sending interval
Intraband comm.
range
Comm. protocol
Data rate
Duration of
experiment
Wi-Fi
TCP
0.003 Acre
3
5 min
2 h
100 m
Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b/g/n), TCP
2.4 GHz
9.35 Mb/s
23 days
profile, whereas Figure 5(d) shows a decreasing
profile, which is in linewith the real phenomena.
Webserver
It is a webpage, where farmers or analysts
can login and check the information with UID. In
this article, we are using " remoteme, " a server
site, which hosts the website and pulls the
weather data.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Testing parameters and values are shown in
Table 1.
Table 2 shows the domination of FarmFox
over the other available solutions concerning
the working parameters. All the sensed data values
are mainly preserved and applied for the
generation of intelligent solutions, such as
design of smart soil watering system and energyefficient
irrigation [11].
CONCLUSIONS
We have developed an IoT-based automated
soil health monitoring system, equipped to deal
with agricultural parameters. Farmers will be able
to integrate different field parameters to take
smart decisions according to the situation. FarmFox
can be directly connected to the cloud and
capable of remote data storage/retrieval facilities.
This article can further be extended to incorporate
AI /machine learning algorithms to help the agroscientists
and farmers taking smarter decisions
and strategy formations toward Agriculture 5.0.
67
Value
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