Abstract
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a smart
irrigation system using Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which can
be used for automating the irrigation process in agricultural fields. It
is expected that this system would create a better opportunity for
farmers to irrigate their fields efficiently, as well as eliminating the
field’s under-watering, which could stress the plants. The developed
system is organized into three parts: sensing side, cloud side, and user
side. We used Microsoft Azure IoT Hub as an underlying infrastructure to
coordinate the interaction between the three sides. The sensing side
uses a Raspberry Pi 3 device, which is a low cost, credit-card sized
computer device that is used to monitor in near real-time soil moisture,
air temperature and relative humidity, and other weather parameters of
the field of interest. Sensors readings are logged and transmitted to
the cloud side. At the cloud side, the received sensing data is used by
the irrigation scheduling model to determine when and for how long the
water pump should be turned on based on a user-predefined threshold. The
user side is developed as an Android mobile app, which is used to
control the operations of the water pump with voice recognition
capabilities. Finally, this system was evaluated using various
performance metrics, such as latency and scalability.