Deep Learning and IoT for Smart Agriculture using
WSN
Aruul Mozhi Varman S
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
India.
aruulmozhivarman@outlook.com
Aravindh S
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
India.
soniaravindh@gmail.com
Abstract—Main objective of the smart agricultural system is to
improve the yield of the field. In this paper, two main streams are
adopted: (i) predicting the suitable crop for the next crop rotation
(ii) improvising the irrigation system of the field by selective
irrigation. The above goal is achieved by periodically monitoring
the field. The monitoring process involves collecting information
about the soil parameters of the field. A wireless sensor network
(WSN) is established to collect these data and have a hindsight
of it by sporadically uploading it to cloud. This uploaded data
forms the basis for analytics. Through experimentation, Long
Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks is found to be the suitable
algorithm. The inferred results are compared with the optimal
values and the best-suited crop is intimated to the user through
SMS service.
Index Terms—IoT, Machine Learning, Agriculture, Wireless
Sensor Network, Smart Irrigation
I. I NTRODUCTION
Traditionally farmers have adopted crop rotation technique
to improve their yield. As the current climate variation is
transmuting it has become very difficult for the farmers to
determine the profitable crop for the next rotation. The growth
of crop depends on environmental conditions as well as soil
parameters. Determination of crop only through soil testing or
only by analyzing the weather pattern of the environment can’t
give a clear insight. Developing a system which integrates
soil quality and other environmental conditions would be apt.
Designing a system which predicts the most suited crop for
the field would help the farmer to have a preplanned insight
for his next rotation. Most of the developing countries are
facing a shortage of water. Countries which are dependent
on agriculture as its backbone, waste massive liters of water
because of lack of water management system. Irrigating the
field when required and as well as till the optimum requirement
would conserve mammoth amount of water.
Literary sources were collected from Agriculture University,
Coimbatore, regarding the widely produced crop along with its
978-1-5090-6621-6/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Arvind Ram Baskaran
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
India.
lf2ram@gmail.com
Prabhu E
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
India.
e prabhu@cb.amrita.edu
appropriate soil parameters. These information sources are the
basement on which the predicted values are compared. Sensors
for the system were selected based on the literary sources, so
that the system is capable of monitoring the soil parameters of
a crop. When the field is large there are chances of obtaining
mundane results and also the overall information of the field
isn’t obtained when only a single node is used. In order to
avoid redundant data and also to obtain the information from
different parts of the field, a WSN is required. Zigbee modules
are used for the wireless communication in the network. The
measured soil parameters from various nodes in the field are
transmitted to the cloud through a gateway. Through stream
analytics, the vast data is channeled to an online database.
Machine learning (ML) workspace is created with predictive
experiment and a training model. The data accumulated in
the database is used to train the model periodically, the
trained model is used in the predictive experiment to infer the
outcome. Farmer queries through SMS, the query is channeled
through stream analytics to the ML workspace and the inferred
output is sent back through Twilio.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Sensors
In order to have quantitative results of the condition of soil
various sensors were used. DHT11 is digital humidity and
temperature sensor which produces a calibrated digital output.
The sensor contains a resistive sense of wet components which
makes it unique to be used in agricultural fields. It also
contains a negative temperature coefficient (NTC) temperature
measurement device, and all these are connected with an 8-bit
high-performance microcontroller. The advantage of using this
sensor is that it has long term stability, faster response, low
cost, strong anti-interference ability. Moreover, it has precise
calibration with relatively less error.
LM35 is an integrated circuit with an ability to measure
the temperature precisely. The output of the sensor is directly
 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
Fig. 1. System Structure
proportional to the surrounding temperature, which can be
scaled to get the actual temperature. The circuitry is sealed
in order to avoid oxidation. It can give precise output when
the temperature ranges from -55 C to 150 C. For every one
degree Celsius change, the output varies by 10mV.
DS18B20 is a digital thermometer which measures the
temperature in Celsius. This temperature sensor is durable,
doesn’t get damaged in a rough and rugged environment.
Some common applications where these are used include
Thermostatic Controls, Industrial systems, Thermally sensitive
systems. This sensor can be considered as a durable device
which would be resistant to diverse situations in the soil.
Soil moisture sensor is used to get an intuition of the
amount of water content in the soil. A customary peasant
would analyze soil moisture for irrigating the agricultural field.
Soil moisture sensor uses LM393 comparator circuit to check
whether the humidity is greater or lesser than the ideal thresh-
old humidity (set by the user). The scope of the sensor is that it
has adjustable threshold level and provides a two state binary
output (high or low). Simple array of sensors can be integrated
with an embedded system, if complex DSP can be used [15].
Field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of the
sensor node improves the node’s efficiency by running at lower
clock speed while performing on par with general purpose
microprocessor [14].
B. Wireless Sensor Network
A WSN may consist many clusters of nodes which are
placed under the control of coordinator. They are generally
used to acquire data of physical parameters like temperature,
pressure, sound etc. Every node consists of an array of sensors
integrated with a micro controller. The acquired data is sent
to the coordinator through wireless modules. The concept of
WSN is widely used when we want to acquire the data of
every part of the field.
C. Cloud Computing and Services
1) IoT Hub and Stream Analytics: Internet of Things (IoT)
hub connects front-end smart devices with a cloud based server
using light weight protocol like Message Query Telemetry
Transport (MQTT) and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
(AMQP). Azure Stream Analytics seamlessly integrates with
Azure IoT Hub and other services to enable powerful real-
time analytics on data from IoT and other connected devices.
Stream processing analyzes and performs actions on real-time
data through the use of continuous queries.
2) Online database and Power BI: Power BI is a cloud
service platform that provides users with tools for aggregating,
analyzing, visualizing and sharing data. Dashboards provide an
overall view for users with their most important data in one
place and get updated in real time.
3) Machine Learning: ML is an important part of artificial
intelligence. Instead of explicitly programming a computer
to solve the problem, it learns with the provided examples.
ML models based on the input data finds pattern and uses
statistical analysis to predict the output within a credible range.
ML algorithms are often categorized as being supervised or
unsupervised or reinforcement learning. Supervised algorithms
require user to provide both input features and its target. Once
the training is complete, the trained algorithm is used for
 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
inferring new data. In case of unsupervised learning, the user
need not provide the target.
4) Twilio: Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a
service (PaaS). Twilio allows the users to programmatically
make and receive phone calls, also send and receive text
messages using web service APIs.
III. R ELATED W ORKS
The context of sensor networks is becoming ubiquitous
in every field of work. The purpose of it in an agricultural
study is to inspect water requirements, weather, crop, and
soil information. It has several advantages and also improves
the traditional efficiencies [1],[9]. The use of WSN has many
outstanding capabilities in analyzing an agricultural land. The
following are some of the salient features which shows notable
headway while implementing a WSN system. 1) Insightful
decision making: In a large area, this feature enhances the
energy efficiency of the overall network, and hence, the
network lifetime increases. Using this method, multiple sensor
nodes amalgamate themselves, and collectively take the final
decision [2]. 2) Effective Topology Configuration: For long
lasting battery life and also for less energy consumption the
nodes gets active only while sending data, rest of the time
it is configured in ’sleep mode’. Only the coordinator is
always active which requires a constant power supply. Using
topology management techniques [3], the sensor nodes can
collaboratively take these decisions. 3) Self-sufficient system:
The network could be outlined for autonomous purposes [4]
with which smart irrigation system can be designed with no
human intervention.
A continuous stream of data is uploaded to the cloud
through coordinator by the WSN. In order to perform process-
ing and analysis of such stream of data using analytics, it is
required to store the data to an online database. IoT is intended
for connectivity of different entities, effective accessibility, and
processing of data [5]. As the use of IoT in the contemporary
world is increasing rapidly, it is necessary to acknowledge the
advancements, benefits, and challenges involved in it [6].
Based on the collected data weather is forecast, with the
addendum of other info regarding the soil suitable crop is
suggested. The weather forecast is carried with the help of
ML. As the data is sequential and time dependent, LSTM and
Gated Recurrent unit (GRU) are apt [11]. Best algorithm is
chosen based on convergence time and loss [11].
IV. M ETHODOLOGY
Prediction of crops using WSN [8], in this journal the
suitable crop is suggested to the user by comparing the soil
parameters with a predefined data set. This method has several
lacunae while predicting a crop for the field. This method
could be highly inappropriate as predicting a crop just by
analyzing the soil parameters only on one particular day. As
plant growth is a long term process, it is futile to predict a crop
by this method. Hence in order to overcome this disadvantage
and accomplish the task, the following methodology is used.
The project is composite of three major blocks as shown in Fig.
1: 1) Remote WSN 2) Cloud 3) Twilio and mobile Application.
A. Remote Wireless Sensor Network
The literature survey obtained from Agricultural University,
Coimbatore elucidates about the ideal parameters such as air
temperature, soil temperature, humidity and moisture level
in addition to soil drainage, soil texture, rooting conditions,
erosion hazard for a well-flourished growth of various crops.
These parameters are utilized to predict the best-suited crop for
the field and to perform smart irrigation. In order to measure
these parameters, the following sensors are used: LM35,
DHT11, DS18B20 and Soil moisture sensor. The information
obtained from these sensors are collected using WSN and sent
to the cloud through a gateway. Other parameters such as
effective soil depth, texture, soil drainage and erosion hazard
results are less invariant hence these parameters are obtained
using manual soil testing. These immutable values are stored
as a dictionary in the database (cloud).
In order to analyze the entire study area using WSN, two
clusters were formed each consisting of two nodes and a
router. Each node and router has a set of sensors along with
a micro-controller and a Zigbee for connecting to the WSN.
Mesh topology is used to connect all the Zigbee with one
another as it is highly reliable in delivering the information.
The data from these nodes and routers are concatenated and
sent to coordinator which is the only node connected to the
gateway. Even the coordinator plays a role in the collection
of sensor readings. Entire quantum of data is uploaded from
the coordinator to the IoT through the gateway. The gateway
is established using a GSM module.
Fig. 2 is the map of the study area and the topology
undertaken is also mentioned for collecting sensor details, the
area corresponds to Ettimadai, Coimbatore.
Fig. 2. Area of Study
B. Configuring Zigbee
Entrenchment of a WSN requires proper configuring of
Zigbee in the same modes for flawless communication [12]. X-
CTU is a free software tool available from Digi International
to interface with Zigbee modules. The suite provides a GUI
 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
and terminal interface to configure the modules as well as a
built in tool to test the Zigbee range and reliability of packet
transmissions. Every Zigbee module is set in the same PAN
ID, appropriate baud rate and also proper designation of each
Zigbee is burned in its firmware.
C. IoT Hub
The acquired data in the form of JavaScript Object Notation
(JSON) is converted to string format and is forwarded to IoT
hub. Through stream analytics, the data is redirected to SQL
database. The time series data stored in the database is used
by the ML studio to train a model. The model burgeons itself
by acquiring more and more data, becoming more accurate.
D. Machine Learning
Earlier a problem was approached through rule based tech-
niques which use if/else statements to solve. Heuristic classifi-
cation approach succeeded it, doesn’t give an optimal solution
rather satisfies the immediate cause. This technique makes
educated guesses. We have used learning based classification
which uses neural networks to solve the cause. The advantage
of using this technique is, it learns any deviation in the data
set and uses this variation to alter the algorithm. We have
implemented three approaches in learning based classification
system which are 1) Feed forward 2) LSTM 3) GRU on the
data set and their accuracy was verified with the validation
set. Feed forward was the first artificial neural network and
the simplest where information flows in one direction (for-
ward) through the input nodes, through the hidden layers
and the output is obtained from the output layer. LSTM is
based on recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture which
recollects at arbitrary intervals. This approach is well suited
for classification and in the prediction of time series data set.
GRU is also based on RNN architecture which was recently
introduced. This approach is faster than LSTM, since it has
fewer parameters. LSTM is found to be an suitable algorithm
for the given data set and hence the soil parameters are
predicted with this approach.
E. Twilio and Mobile Application
A web app is designed to take Chronological details (time
of sowing) from the user to predict the suitable crop. ML
Studio API is actuated by the web application which initiates
the inference project, here the future parameters of the soil
are evaluated and is mapped with the suitable crop from the
literature survey. The processed output is sent to the user’s
mobile through Twilio API.
F. Smart Irrigation System
Soil moisture is the crucial parameter which determines
the water content in the soil [13]. Every node in the WSN
measures the moisture as one of its particulars. An optimal
value for it is set, below which the nearby motor is triggered
and set on till the soil moisture level reaches its optimum.
V. R ESULTS
Soil temperature, atmospheric temperature and humidity
level in the area of study was measured from seven nodes in
the WSN. The values were collected and uploaded periodically
in an interval of five minutes duration. The sensor reading was
noted for twelve months duration and this massive quantum
of data was streamed to store in the database. Maximum and
minimum values for respective parameters was determined and
was used to train ML model. Table I gives the values of a
sample used to train a ML algorithm.
Based on the obtained data set three different ML models
were trained using RMSProp optimizer and their validation
losses were calculated in terms of mean square error.
ML Models considered:
• GRU Validation Loss: 9.2752 Training Time: 48.52s
• LSTM Validation Loss: 2.1354 Training Time: 57.62s
• Feed Forward Neural Network (Under Fitting) Valida-
tion Loss:115.9542 Training Time:39.01s, Feed Forward
Neural Network (Over Fitting) Validation Loss:8.3786
Training Time:76.25s
The trained feed forward neural network fits a function by
matching the features with the corresponding targets but it
doesn’t learn the sequence in the data. So it under fits the data.
When trained with higher epoch the model doesn’t generalize
well and starts to overfit the data. Hence feed forward network
isn’t a suitable model.
Model with minimum validation loss and considerable train-
ing time has to be considered. Based on observed results
LSTM model is chosen. With this as the proposed model soil
parameters are predicted for the next entire year 2017.
Fig. 3 represents the predicted minimum and maximum hu-
midity levels for July 2017. Similary Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 depicts
the predicted minimum and maximum soil and atmospheric
temperature respectively for July 2017.
These predicted values along with the results from soil
testing are compared with the literary sources. From the
comparison, Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) is found to be
the best crop followed by Abelmoschus esculentus (ladies’
fingers). The obtained results were convincingly accepted by
local experts. Upon the user’s request through SMS the appeal
is attended by inferring periodically updated prediction, the
upshot is sent to the user through Twilio.
VI. C ONCLUSION
Instead of suggesting crop based on a day’s environmental
conditions as did in [8] the proposed model is a learning based
classification approach, the prediction is more accurate and
helps in analyzing the entire soil parameter pattern for the
future tenure more reliably. As the future pattern is determined
for a fixed period of time it becomes simpler to suggest a
suitable crop that can be sowed, this would help the user to
make a more pre-deterministic approach towards agriculture
rather based on personal intuition.
 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

TABLE I
S ENSOR DATA

Node Atmospheric Temperature Soil Temperature Humidity

Type Max Min Max Min Max Min
Node11(N11) 32.65 17.36 30.91 18.28 68.71 55.83
Node12(N12) 32.17 17.20 31.81 17.62 68.70 56.48
Router1(R1) 33.31 17.59 32.17 17.94 68.17 55.50
Node21(N21) 32.42 17.14 32.01 17.68 68.82 54.99
Node22(N22) 32.53 16.50 32.86 17.33 67.76 55.94
Router2(R2) 31.98 17.26 31.80 18.50 68.76 54.93
Coordinator(C) 31.45 17.27 32.13 18.67 69.07 56.40
Table I shows the Maximum (Max) and Minimum (Min) of the sensor values from the nodes at Ettimadai, Coimbatore on 6th January 2016.

Fig. 3. Predicted Max and Min humidity from (01-07-2017 to 31-07-2017)

Fig. 4. Predicted Max and Min soil temperature from (01-07-2017 to 31-07-2017)
 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

Fig. 5. Predicted Max and Min atmospheric temperature from (01-07-2017 to 31-07-2017)

VII. F UTURE SCOPE
Collection of the gargantuan amount of data and processing
it in the cloud using server client architecture becomes a Her-
culean task. The major hurdles faced are Latency and Capacity.
To improve the response time a distributed framework based
on fog architecture could be established. Unlike the cloud
were computing and services are centralized to a node, fog
architecture pushes it to the logical extremes of the network
[10].
The ideal sowing time for a crop determines its progress of
growth and also its quality. Prediction of the sowing time can
be done by neural networks trained with quantum amount of
data, thereby predicting the best time to sow the best suited
crop.
Smart agriculture effectiveness can be improved by pre-
dicting the ideal time for manuring, applying fertilizer and
pesticides.
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