An Overview of IoT Networks
The IoT application commonly used in agriculture is based on wireless sensor networks. It consists of the following components: sensors, sensor nodes, radio transmission and data processing. Possible variants include RFID and remote sensing services as the basis for data.
The Most Important Components: Sensors
The most common measurement fields for IoT sensors are temperature, humidity, soil moisture and irrigation status. Biosensors are used in animal monitoring and measure antibodies, enzymes, nucleic acids or specific cells. Recent developments in sensor technology point towards embedded, intelligent, integrated and miniaturized sensors.
With sensor data, farmers develop an understanding of the interactions in their fields and livestock. In a second step, productivity can then be increased through optimized operations based on the sensor data.
Connectivity and Data Transmission
The information from the sensors is transmitted to sensor nodes from where it is further transmitted. Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN), WLAN, BLE, Zigbee or LoRaWAN are possible transmission technologies. All transmission methods are currently already in use.
Researchers predict that the main direction of agricultural sensor networks in the future will be LPWAN (represented by LoRa and NBIoT). LPWAN will be complemented by 4G and 5G to enable the transmission of large files such as agricultural images and audio files.
Sensors
- Temperature
- Soil condition
- Air humidity
- Soil moisture
- Irrigation
- Air pressure
- Light
- pH value