Low-Cost Fog Computing Platform for Soil Moisture Management

Agriculture is experiencing a process of modernization enabled by Information and Communications Technology. This process enables improvement in decision-making processes on activities such as planting spacing, fertilization, and irrigation. The amount of water in the soil is an essential factor for the development of any crop, and it affects productivity, cost, and sustainability. Enhanced monitoring of soil moisture enables the timely reaction to undesirable moisture states and thus avoids negative effects on crops. In this direction, this paper presents a platform that leverages Internet of Things and Edge Computing to monitor soil moisture through sensors, data communication between sensors and edge devices, and an Analytics-as-a-Service cloud that provides analysis of the collected data in the form of a density map of soil moisture, indicating which areas should be irrigated with greater or lesser frequency. A small-scale evaluation of the platform deployed in a rural area shows that the proposed platform achieves similar levels of accuracy than conventional measurement methods without requiring the presence of humans on the field.