Development of a Wireless Sensor Network and IoT-based Smart Irrigation System

Abstract

This study proposes a smart irrigation system (SIS) using the drip method, which was designed and implemented using wireless sensor networks and an open-source Internet of Things (IoT) cloud computing platform (“Thingspeak.com”) for data collection, storing, data analytics, and visualization. The methodology incorporates the integration of hardware and software components to make irrigation decisions based on web resources like the weather forecast from “weather.com” and sensor values from soil samples. The data collected are then analyzed at the edge server and updated every 15 minutes. Based on the threshold value, the system starts pumping water or stops the irrigation process depending on the irrigation schedule. A web application was developed to display the result so that we could monitor and control the system using an android application edge or a web browser. Based on the data recorded and measured, the data are in comma-separated values (CSV) format and contain 143731 entries with 10 columns. The sample size used contains 5722 rows and 6 columns from the result of our machine learning algorithms using Microsoft Excel and Jupyter Notebook to process and evaluate the performance of the drip SIS, considering the soil moisture, soil temperature, sunlight, rain, and pump. The results confirm the threshold metrics classification evaluation, and some of the metrics computed from our confusion matrix are shown in the classification summary results, showing the accuracy to be 89%, the misclassification rate (error rate) is equal to 10%, the sensitivity is equal to 79%, the specificity is equal to 93%, and the precision of the model is 81%. The evaluation, when compared to K-nearest neighbours using K = 6 and K = 1, shows the prediction accuracy to be 97% and 98%. The results indicate the system is highly efficient and reliable in performing irrigation and managing water resources and can be adopted in rural areas to boost agricultural productivity.