Design and Implementation of an IoT System for Smart Energy Consumption and Smart Irrigation in Tunnel Farming

• Main Authors: M. Safdar Munir, Imran Sarwar Bajwa, M. Asif Naeem, Bushra Ramzan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-12-01
• Series: Energies
• Subjects: IoT; tunnel irrigation; smart energy consumption; smart irrigation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/12/3427

Efficient and cost effective ways of irrigation have emerged as the need of the hour due to limited sweet water resources, especially the countries that are seriously hit by a lack of sweet water reservoirs. The majority of the water is wasted due to inefficient ways of watering plants. In this paper, we propose an intelligent approach for efficient plant irrigation that has a database of daily water needs of a type of plant and decides the amount of water for a plant type on the basis of the current moisture in soil, humidity, and time of the day. This approach not only saves sweet water by efficient utilization, but also supports smart consumption of energy. Our approach employs IoT and a set of sensors to efficiently record plant data and their watering needs and the approach is implemented with a mobile phone application interface that is used to continuously monitor and control the efficient watering system. The results of this study are easy to reproduce as the sensors used are cheap and easy to access. The study discusses in this paper is experimented on small area (such as tunnel farm) but the results of the experiments show that the used approach can be generalized and can be used for large size fields for efficient irrigation. The results of the experiments also outperform the manual approach and the similar approaches for sensor based irrigation systems.