Towards Autonomous Farms Based on Fog Computing

Abstract

Nowadays, the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud has led to great developments not only in industry but also in agriculture. Many researches and projects have been elaborated so far in this context. It aims at reducing human efforts as well as resources and power consumption by enabling automated calculation of crop yield, automatic watering of field and timely reporting of disorders. On another hand, many contributions aim to incorporate robots and drones in smart farms to autonomously perform crop dusting, fertilizing and other field related farming tasks. These robots and drones are latency-sensitive and equipped with multiple sensors that collect various data pertaining to the agricultural area and sending it to the cloud for further analysis. However, the long distance between the source of data and the Cloud leads to a significant increase in response time, which leads to a decrease in performances. This paper presents an alternative solution based on Fog Nodes (FN) and LoRa technology to reduce the total latency induced during data transmission from these latency-sensitive drones/robots towards the Cloud for processing as well as optimizing the number of nodes deployment in the wide smart farms.