EEWMP: An IoT-Based Energy-Efficient Water Management Platform for Smart Irrigation

Abstract

Precision agriculture is now essential in today’s world, especially for countries with limited water resources, fertile land, and enormous population. Smart irrigation systems can help countries efficiently utilize fresh water and use the excess water for barren lands. Smart water management platform (SWAMP) is an IoT-based smart irrigation project designed for efficient freshwater utilization in agriculture. The primary aim of SWAMP is to auto manage water reserves, distribution, and consumption of various levels, avoid over-irrigation and under-irrigation problems, and auto manage time to maximize production. This research proposed an energy-efficient water management platform (EEWMP), an improved version of SWAMP. EEWMP is an IoT-based smart irrigation system that uses field-deployed sensors, sinks, fusion centres, and open-source clouds. Both models’ performance is evaluated in energy consumption, network stability period, packet sent to destination, and packet delivery ratio. The experimental results show that EEWMP consumes 30% less energy and increases network stability twice than SWAMP. EEWMP can be used in different irrigation models such as drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, surface irrigation, and lateral move irrigation with subtle alterations. Moreover, it can also be used in small farms of third-world countries with their existing communication infrastructures such as 2G or 3G.