Cloud-based Internet of Things Approach for SmartIrrigation System: Design and Implementation

Water plays a significant role in the economic de-velopment of countries. The agriculture sector is the most water-consuming; this sector consumes 69% of the freshwater. However,farmers often use traditional irrigation systems to water theircrops. These systems are ineffective and consume a lot of timeand effort, especially when there are several fields distributedin different geographical regions. Therefore, employing smartirrigation techniques will significantly overcome these problems.In this paper, we propose an intelligent irrigation frameworkbased on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things(IoT) cloud services. The proposed system consists of three maincomponents; the WSN, the control unit, and cloud services.Arduino Uno and XBee ZigBee modules are combined to gathersensors data and send them wirelessly to the control unit. YL-69 sensor is used to monitor the soil moisture. Raspberry Pi isutilized to gather data, process them, provide the proper decision,and transfer them to ThingSpeak IoT cloud. In the cloud, the datacollected from the system is stored to create instance visualizationof live data and send alerts. This allows farmers to monitor thestatus of crops and make the required decisions. After inspectingthe prototype, many challenges are posed for future work