Sensor Based Context-Aware System Architecture for Improving Yields in Agriculture

For countries like Ethiopia, agriculture is a backbone. The country’s most economic activities depend on agriculture. Agricultural commodities account for half of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, factors like poor infrastructure, traditional techniques used for farming, periodic drought, and soil degradation have been the main obstacles for not projecting the export income, and also for not supporting and sustaining people needing food assistance. On the other hand, globally Information Communication Technology (ICT) is growing in an alarming rate and developing countries like Ethiopia are doing their level best to mainstream ICT solutions in all sectors of the economy. The agricultural sector is one of the areas in which ICT can be of paramount importance. In this work, we have designed and developed sensor based Context-Aware System Architecture (CASA) for improving yield in agriculture. The work in CASA has focused on modelling and creating system architecture that merges two well known technological domains namely context-aware computing and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for the benefit of improving agricultural products. The architecture would present generic solution to solve many problems like crop irrigation, fertilization, pesticide spraying, and early detection of various crop specific issues. The work has mainly focused on one of the problems, crop irrigation. One of the technologies used is Context-Aware Computing, which involves sensing the context via sensors. Our work involves sensors of different kinds deployed throughout the desired area which are sensing the environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, etc. Then the data would pass through a middleware, which has some components like application interface, sensor network interface, and database controller. The aggregated data would be processed and analyzed to create context model, then an action command would be sent to the respective application. Implementation of sensor based context-aware solutions in agriculture can be considered as an extension of Precision Agriculture. The proposed work would transform the traditional agricultural practices, would be low cost, would ensure proper monitoring of the fields, would require less involvement of human, would be instantaneous, and would bring about accurate decision making.