2016 International Conference on Information Technology Systems and Innovation (ICITSI)

Bandung – Bali, October 24 – 27, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5090-2449-0

Sensor Networks Data Acquisition and Task

Management for Decision Support of Smart Farming
Sinung Suakanto#1, Ventje J. L. Engel#2, Maclaurin Hutagalung#3, Dina Angela#4
#1,2,3,4
Information Technology, Institut Teknologi Harapan Bangsa
Jl. Dipati Ukur 80-84 Bandung, West Java, Indonesia
Email: 1sinung@ithb.ac.id, 2ventje@ithb.ac.id, 3maclaurin@ithb.ac.id, 4dina@ithb.ac.id

Abstract—Agricultural sector has been facing great

challenges in order to feed the increasing number of population
living in the world. In the future, it will be very difficult to rely on
traditional farming to produce food. Some researchers and
industry experts have begun developing smart farming by
utilizing information technology. This paper presents the
conceptual model and system design for decision support of
smart farming with network sensor applications in order to
perform necessary tasks required for farmers. We propose a
comprehensive model using Internet of Things (IoT) approach
which will be applied to agriculture. Data acquisition via sensors,
control and tasks management, and data analysis are considered
in the development of model and system design. In this system,
we propose a solution to help farmers facing problems of tasks
management and planning, environment factors measurements,
and information distribution.
Keywords—sensor networks, data acquisition, smart farming,
task management, decision support, internet of things
I. INTRODUCTION
Food needs are one of the basic needs for human beings.
With the increasing number of population living in the world,
food becomes a necessity that needs to be supplied in big
quantities and good quality. One of the sectors that need to be
improved to the food supply is agriculture and livestock.
The agricultural sector is going to face great challenges in
order to feed the 9.6 billion people that the FAO predicts are
going to inhabit the planet by 2050 [1]. Food production must
increase by 70% by 2050. This has to be achieved in spite of
the limited availability of lands and the increasing need for
fresh water (agriculture consumes 70 per cent of the world’s
fresh water supply) [1]. Figure 1 depicts growth comparison
between global population and food supply. In addition to a
growing scarcity of natural resources, farmers and farming
industries have to cope with climate change effects, such as
notably greater rainfall variability and more frequent extreme
weather events [2]. So it becomes important for farming
stakeholders to understand about the changes in farmland
environments more than ever.
Information technology and communication (ICT) can be
empowered to help to manage agriculture. ICT can be
empowered to monitor and record what happens at some crop
land to be reported and acted upon. Agriculture is going
through radical technological changes. Farmers are starting to
use guidance systems to determine the position of their tractors.
Figure 1. Global Population and food supply [3]
Farmers are starting to use smart devices to turn on and
switch off sprinklers, yield monitors to measure harvest
volumes, soil moisture sensors, soil density sensors, infrared
crop health sensors and a lot more [4]. This sensing technology
makes farm more intelligent and more connected then so-called
smart farming. The other term for smart farming is precision
agriculture.
Smart farming and precision agriculture are alike but
actually rather different. Precision agriculture is a farming
management concept based on observing, measuring and
responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. The goal
of precision agriculture research is to define a decision support
system (DSS) for whole farm management with the goal of
optimizing returns on inputs while preserving resources [5],
[6]. It is clear now that smart farming focuses in getting and
monitoring the farmland environment. Meanwhile, precision
agriculture focuses in data and information analysis to support
farmers and stakeholders in making decisions [4]. Smart
farming technologies, coupled with data-driven precision
agriculture, will enable farmers to reduce costs as well as
maximize yields and profits [7]. In this paper, the two terms
will be used interchangeably.
The most important things for smart farming are
environmental conditions monitoring and water resources
management. The measurements of environmental conditions
and water management pair with farming market data should
become the data driver of precision agriculture. Authors have
developed and used various devices for detecting and
collecting environmental conditions [8] and realized the
opportunity to implement the custom systems for smart
farming. The customization has to consider how to keep tracks

978-1-5090-2449-0/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE

of environmental factors in farmland and does communication a. Planting Plan (seeding, planting, fertilizing,
with external systems, such as irrigation system to regulate harvesting)
water and gateway system to notify the stakeholders [9]. b. Trucking plan
Moreover, the system must be able to do data analysis with
cheap computing resources. 4. Information Distribution

This paper presents the conceptual model and system a. Access and notification (SMS, app-based alert)
design for smart farming with network sensor applications in b. Dashboard
order to perform necessary tasks required for farmers. Data 5. Decision Support System (DSS)
acquisition, tasks control, and data analysis are also considered.
In this system, we developed the solution to help farmers DSS is used to determine critical decision from the
facing problems of tasks management and planning, soil result of the monitoring part. DSS will use statistical
factors measurements, and information distribution. analysis and basic machine learning to help farmers to
make decision in real-time.
II. CONCEPTUAL MODEL 6. Control Action
The main problems addressed in this paper are of tasks
management and planning, soil factors measurements, and Control action is used to follow up decision made by
information distribution. From these main problems, there has DSS automatically.
to be requirements analysis to define the needs and landscape
for building the conceptual model.
A. Requirement Analysis
In order to build the model, it’s important to understand the
constraints from sensor networks and signal access in rural area
[8]. Second, the amount of data processed have to be
considered also. These are the requirements for the model:
• Easy to be implemented is very important because
some farming stakeholders already have their own
system
• Easy to configure is the next important requirement.
• Able to extract and filter sensor data
• Support low-medium data traffic
• Able to connect to internet for reaching farming
industry stakeholders and getting market data
• Able to adapt with change and adversary that may Figure 2. Smart Farming Conceptual Model
happen
It’s important that modules built on top of this model have
B. Smart Farming Model to be light and easy enough to integrate with other system.
In the previous subsection, the requirements have been Some researchers have implemented a smart way for irrigation
defined and from those requirements the model now can be control [10]. Therefore, the already running irrigation control
built. Smart farming model can be categorized into building can be integrated within this model.
blocks that can be modeled as shown in Figure 2.
1. Monitoring
a. Soil characteristics (pH, macro mineral, such as N,
P, and K)
b. Air quality characteristics (temperature, humidity,
Ozone)
c. Water characteristics (pH, temperature, Dissolved
Oxygen, Fluoride)
d. Market monitoring (seed price, fertilizer price,
crops price)
e. Weather API
2. Management
a. Tracking System (Tractors, Farming Vehicle,
Farming Equipment)
b. Irrigation System
3. Planning
Figure 3. Example of Irrigation Control [10]
 There are three main processes from data analysis
perspective: sensing, preprocessing, and inference [11].
Sensing is the acquisition of data from object and
environments. Preprocessing is an important step in data
analytics. Preprocessing concerns with cleaning and filtering
the data and then extracting features that are needed for
inference. Inference is the core of data analysis. Inference
focuses in mathematical reasoning for decision support. These
three processes are included in the decision support part in the
model.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN
At this section, we describe about the system design. We
begin with an overview of systematic architecture. We also
describe about the integration network sensor into TCP/IP
network with protocol communication [8].
A. Architecture
Proposed architecture for smart farming could be seen in
Figure. 4. The system consists of network sensors, server and
network. The sensors have main function to collect data.
Network sensors are collection of sensors placed in specific
area called swathe. Swathe is 1x1 or 2x2 meters of farmland.
Sensors will be placed in farm swathe and communication
between note and gateway is via IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The
data from sensor are sent to server via Remote Terminal Unit
(RTU). Data transmission can use the radio access technologies
such as GPRS or EDGE.
The server can be equipped with a database or GIS
(Geographical Information System) features. On the server
side, it can use cloud computing infrastructure. The
applications will be provided for users. Applications will
retrieve data from sensor, so it will not directly access data
from sensors. The summaries of environment and market
conditions will be displayed in dashboard in order to make
users easier to understand the data. Users can find information
about current condition from this dashboard application. The
results from sensor reading also can also be displayed on
dashboard application.
B. Gateway
Gateway stores the data locally and then send the data into
internet. Gateway consists of two modules: data collector and
Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) [12]. Data collector is
responsible for translating environmental conditions into data
understood by computing machine. RTU module has main
function to capture data from sensor both in digital or analog
input. Package of specific sensors with Remote Terminal Unit
(RTU) will be placed in some places in the farm to monitor the
environment. RTU architecture can be seen in Figure 5.
Figure 5 Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) Architecture
Sensors in farming have different and various
characteristics, some are digital sensors and the others are
analog sensors. Therefore, RTU uses analog and digital sensor
in the form of voltage change [12]. To change signal from
sensors become voltage change, it requires signal conditioning
circuit [12].

Figure 4 Network Architecture of Smart Farming

 C. Integrating Network into Internet
The connection between network sensor with the server and
the users can use internet or TCP/IP network. Internet can be
used as a basic underlying network because mostly network
hardware now supported with IP-Based.
Cloud computing could be proposed as central of data
processing to run service like service listener. The advantage of
using cloud is with rapid growing of sensors amount and
requirements, cloud can be expanded easily. It has functions to
capture and store information sent from the remote client.
Otherwise, it could be used for the central data storage and
application server to display the processed results to the users.
IV. DISCUSSIONS
The system design above absolutely has constraints. Some
Internet of Things (IoT) research had been conducted to
address the constraints, advantages, and weaknesses of IoT
design and implementation [13]–[15]. At this section, we will
discuss constraints regarding traffic management and data
nature. These two constraints are unique to implementation in
farmland or rural area and connected to data analysis.
A. Traffic Management
Traffic management will be discussed from front-end to
back-end. Sensors will generate traffic to gateway or RTU, so
they are implemented in specific ways, as follows:
• Capable to active or die automatically when power is
cut or power supply is empty
• Able to transmit data independently or autonomously
without user intervention
• Able to coordinate with other node to avoid a flood of
data traffic resulting in transmission delay
Each sensor will send data to the nearest sensor and the
sensor will send the data to next nearest sensor and so on until
the data arrived at gateway. This will ensure that gateway will
not be flooded by data simultaneously from all sensors. It will
make traffic from sensor to gateway more manageable.
At gateway, traffic will be managed, as follows:
• Readings from sensors are not carried out continuously
but in a given period
• Communication to server via internet is not carried out
continuously but in a given period
• There is a certain period when system will not do
reading from sensors at all. This period is called force
sleep period.
Thus, the gateway will have three periods, namely sensors
reading period, data transmission period, and force sleep
period. This strategy not only to make traffic management
easier, but also to reserve power resources which are limited at
sensor nodes and gateway.
B. Data Nature
This data nature constraint occurs naturally when the
amount of implemented sensors increase by time. With sensors
price getting cheaper and implementation becoming easier, the
amount of sensors will gradually increase. Some researchers
predict that the growth will be exponentially [11].
The smart farming data will sometimes need real-time
responses. There are primarily two modes of smart farming
data: periodic observations or monitoring and abnormal event
reporting. Periodic observations present demands due to their
high volumes and storage overheads. Events on the other hand
are one-off but need a rapid response.
Because the amount of data will be huge despite the traffic
management, we need key strategy to data nature constraints,
as follows:
• Availability. It will ensure that the sensors will read the
data farmers need and also manage authorization
regarding who will be able to access the data.
• Usability. It will ensure that the data will help farmers
and stakeholders to accomplish the goals and also
define format and data storage.
• Reliability. It will ensure the consistency and integrity
of data and help in preprocessing of data in decision
support part in the conceptual model.
If information is incorrect or missing, decisions cannot be
made or - even worse - can be wrong, which may lead to
undesired results. Since information is built on data we must
have insight in the quality of our data sources. The above
strategy will ensure that the system will have good quality data
in order to generate needed information.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This study has developed conceptual model and system
design that consist of network sensor, server, application and
also communication protocol for smart farming. The
conceptual model includes six parts responsible for monitoring,
management, planning, information distribution, decision
support, and control action. This model considers not only
aspects in sensor networks and control but also data analysis
for decision support. The model concerns about data analysis,
because sensor networks alone cannot help the farmers.
Authors have developed a complete system design for
smart farming so farming industry stakeholders can implement
the system in easy way. The design focuses about sensor
implementation in farm swathes, communication and
transmission protocol, and server infrastructure. Clearly, the
system design has weakness in form of constraints. The
constraints discussed are traffic management and data nature.
Authors provide the stakeholders with some strategies to
overcome the two constraints.
Further research is needed to implement the system design
in a way to make sure that the constraint strategies will be
carried out accordingly. Two main ideas for further research
with different perspective are: 1) business and market-oriented
research regarding data quality to make sure decision support
system can really support the stakeholders; 2) geospatial-like
research to ensure the signal reach from one node to other node
and gateway.
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