An Open-Source Approach to Wireless Internet of Things (IoT): Smart Agriculture Proof-of Concept Using FIWARE

Abstract

Agriculture is considered as a vital activity for providing food to the increasingly growing population reaching 8.6 billion in 2030, according to the UN. Agriculture is directly tied to the availability of water and requires irrigation always. Although the world’s freshwater resources are scarce and in limited amounts, many of the existing irrigation systems and practices are highly inefficient, leading to a significant waste of water. Modern problems require modern solutions, the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm supported in shaping many of the existing solutions to tackle water resources management in agriculture, combining the latest technological developments from various fields. The principal purpose of this work is to demonstrate a novel approach for water resources management in precision agriculture by exploiting a context information management framework named FIWARE. The outcome is a complete context-aware system combined of the various Generic Enablers provided by FIWARE, capable of making autonomous irrigation decisions (using Complex Event Processing) which are not solely based on sensor-related measurements, but further on the integration of different sources of information such as weather forecast data from OpenWeatherMap. By doing so, optimal management of water resources according to the predicted weather conditions has been achieved within the system.