Keshav Kaushik
School of Computer Science, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a game-changing technology that symbolizes the future of computers and telecommunications. Agriculture is the lifeblood of the majority of people on the planet. As a result, sophisticated IT solutions are required to integrate conventional agricultural processes. Modern technology may help manage costs, servicing, and performance monitoring. In today’s agriculture, satellite and aerial photography are critical. Agriculture’s most essential need is irrigation. The appropriate use of water resources is critical, and there is a pressing need to conserve water. Farmers in poor nations, resulting in inefficient use of environmental assets, mostly use traditional agricultural cultivation methods. This chapter highlights the applications of smart agriculture using the concept of IoT and cloud infrastructure. The chapter also discusses the open research challenges in the domain of smart agriculture. Moreover, the cyberattacks on the IoT applications in smart agriculture is also the part of this chapter.
Keywords: Cloud, smart agriculture, Internet of Things (IoT), IoT applications, quantum drones, cybersecurity, smart irrigation, security challenges
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a game-changing innovation that facilitates future of communication and information technology. Agriculture is the lifeblood of the majority of people on the planet. As a result, smart IT techniques are required to integrate traditional agricultural methods. Modern technology may help manage costs, maintenance, and performance monitoring. In today’s agriculture, satellite and aerial photography are critical. Smart Agriculture is a rising, cost-effective approach for agricultural and food production that is both efficient and reliable. It’s a technique for incorporating connected gadgets and cutting-edge innovation into agriculture. The IoT has brought great advantages to agriculture, including efficient water usage, input augmentation, and many more. The immense gains that have lately changed farming were what made all the difference. IoT-based Smart Farming improves the overall agricultural system by monitoring the field in real-time.
Because of sensors and connectedness, the IoT in Farming has not only reduced farmers’ time but also reduced resource waste such as electricity and water. It keeps track of a number of factors, including moisture, temperature, and soil, and displays them in a crystal-clear real-time display. In order to meet increased demand and decrease production losses, IoT applications in agriculture are directed at conventional agricultural tasks. In agriculture, drones, UAVs, sensor systems, and computer imaging are used in conjunction with ever-improving machine learning and data mining techniques to observe crops, measure and map fields, and transmit data to farmers for cost-effective farm management. In aggrotech, the IoT is a system that combines sensitive physical equipment with analytical software. The majority of the time, an analytical dashboard is a piece of software that processes data collected by equipment. As a result, a solid technical grasp of robotics and computer-based intelligence is required for operating, maintaining, and comprehending the thoughts of these priceless machines. Because IoTs need actual equipment, each farm will require its own collection of sensors and bots to capture data specific to that farm. As a result, each farm will have its own dashboard to see the data. It is not feasible to connect and scale IoT for several fields in a single platform, unlike SaaS aggrotech like CropIn, which allows you to integrate and manage global operations via a single platform.
Sensors have been downsized as a result of recent advances in developing technologies, and attempts to utilize them in a variety of disciplines have been effective. Furthermore, the adoption of IoT and Cloud Computing in any area is resulting in the notion of “Smart,” which includes Smart Health Systems [1], Pervasive Computation, Smart Mobility, Embedded Systems, Security Systems, and Smart meters [2], among others. Agriculture is one of the fields of research where this acceptance has occurred, culminating in Smart Agriculture. Agriculture is a critical source of revenue and lifestyle for the world’s most populated countries, including India, China, and many others. Incorporating IoT and Cloud Computing into the agricultural industry would result in improved crop production by regulating costs, tracking progress, and maintaining equipment, all of which would assist farmers and the country as a whole. The comparative study of latest papers related to Smart Agriculture and IoT is shown above in Table 5.1.
The growing need for food, in terms of quantity and quality, has hastened the need for agricultural industrialization and aggressive techniques of production. A rising IoT market is proposing various unique ideas at the vanguard of the new farming era. Connecting with IoT allows research institutions and scientific associations to expand their reach and speed, bringing technologies and goods to a variety of farm sectors. The IoT is a developing framework that aims to synchronize various smart devices in order to modernize multiple domains. Several IoT-based frameworks have been proposed to record and handle agricultural areas with optimum human interaction in an automated way. Farmers [10] may use IoT apps to stay up to date on the recent developments and advances in their area. Furthermore, the availability of cloud-based smart apps and models aids farmers in maintaining control over their crops. Such technologies, for instance, have the capacity to gather data, analyses it, and predict the optimal response in various scenarios in order to tackle the anticipated issue. Problems like this arise as a consequence of unfavorable weather and a variety of crop diseases.
The IoT is transforming agriculture by giving farmers with a varied collection of tools to handle a variety of difficulties they experience on the farm. IoT-enabled technology allows farmers to communicate to their farm from practically anywhere and at any time. Sensors and actuators monitor the agricultural procedure, in which, wireless sensor networks are utilized to regulate the farmland. To access the farm remotely and gather information in the form of films and photographs, wireless sensors and cameras were utilized. Farmers can also utilize IoT to monitor the present state of their agricultural land from anywhere in the world using a smart phone. IoT-enabled solutions have the ability to reduce crop production costs while also increasing agricultural production.
IoT Modern electronic agriculture is made possible by smart technology. To handle today’s issues, innovation has become a requirement, and various industries are automating their processes using the latest advancements. Smart agriculture [11], which is built on IoT technology, is designed to help producers and farmers minimize waste and increase output by regulating fertilizer use to increase process efficiency. Farmers can better regulate their animals, develop crops, decrease expenses, and conserve resources using IoT-based Smart Agriculture. Farmers have benefited from the use of IoT in a variety of ways, including monitoring water quantities in tanks. This is all done in real time, which improves the effectiveness of the entire irrigation operation. The monitoring of seed growth is another thing which has been made feasible by the introduction of IoT technology. Producers can now monitor resource use and the time it takes for a seed to completely mature into a plant.
The adoption of IoT in farming was akin to the Green Revolution’s second wave. Farmers have reaped two main advantages from the IoT. With the support of reliable data collected via IoT, they can now do the same number of jobs in less time while simultaneously increasing agricultural yields. Sensors monitor every aspect of crop production, including moisture in the soil, temperature, sunlight, climate, and irrigation management automation. This technique enables farmers to keep an eye on their fields from anywhere. When compared to traditional farming, IoT-based farming is significantly more efficient. Smart farming based on IoT not only aids in the modernization of traditional farming techniques, but also targets alternative agricultural methods such as sustainable agriculture, family farming, and boosts extremely transparent farming. Smart farming based on the IoT is also good for the environment. It may assist farmers in making better use of water and optimizing inputs and treatments. Now, we will look (Figure 5.1) at the applications of IoT and cloud in the smart agriculture that are transforming the agricultural industry.
The IoT is a collection of physical items that can recognize themselves to other gadgets and utilize integrated technology to communicate with intrinsic or extrinsic states. Many computing devices with monitoring and communication capabilities are now linked due to advances in technology. Such devices [14] collect information from the environment, process it, and then either retain or transfer the information to another device with comparable characteristics. A few examples [15] of IoT applications are smart homes, intelligent buildings, smart grids, and smart cars. For remote access, collection, distribution, and processing, these applications need distributed information delivery architectures. As a consequence, communication among smart things opens up new possibilities for applications aimed at improving human health. Enormous communication inside these cyber-physical systems, on the other hand, raises a slew of security issues. Such security [16] flaws have the potential to disrupt whole applications/ systems, perhaps resulting in death. As a result, modern IoT applications must have high levels of trust and security. To that aim, it’s critical to comprehend the major security issues that smart IoT applications face, such as those in the e-health, agricultural, and energy industries. As a result, in order to improve the security of smart IoT applications, this article describes and addresses the key security issues and needs.
Attacks on the IoT system may be interpreted or characterized from a variety of perspectives, depending on whether they are aggressive or passive. These may also be used to determine if the assault is coming from the inside of the network or from outside. In any instance, information security and anonymity must be protected. In IoT case studies, the customer has access to the data and the authorized machine, information confidentiality is a critical concern. It involves addressing two key features: first, a means for validating and verifying identities, and second, an admission limitation and penalty process. The verification of a legal IoT device is the confirmation of the identification of the IoT based networks for internet or fog-based services. To utilize the cloud services safely, IoT apps must verify their identity. User confidentiality is another difficult issue with real-time apps. With IoT applications where devices are interconnected, privacy is another major challenge. The IoT related common cyberattacks in smart agriculture are given below in Figure 5.2.
Agricultural knowledge and digitization are addressed by smart agriculture. With the advancement of agriculture spurred on by current digital technology, however, data security risks must be addressed. Three distinct smart sustainable agriculture modes are discussed in this research [17]. Sustainable farming is still in its infancy, with few security mechanisms. Future solutions will rely on data accessibility and accuracy to aid farmers, and security will be critical to constructing reliable and productive systems. Because smart agriculture carries a wide variety of resources and huge amount of data, security must handle challenges such as interoperability, less number of resources, and enormous data. The aim of this study [18] is to assess the existing level of smart agricultural security, especially in open-field farming, by explaining its design, outlining security diffi-culties, and providing important obstacles and future perspectives. In the agricultural industry, new information technologies and applications will be increasingly employed to maintain and enhance operations, efficiency, and productivity. The widespread use of information, meanwhile, brings with it significant security dangers and weaknesses, and the industry is now being attacked like never before. Using an analytical technique, some comments on the security difficulties that Smart Farming technologies confront are presented in this study [19].
Smart Agriculture is a promising field that is evolving day by day due to the support of advanced technologies like IoT, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Blockchain etc. Due to its wide nature, it provides a vast array of research scope and opportunities. This section highlights the open research challenges for IoT and cloud computing in Smart Agriculture. IoT is a developing paradigm that aims to link various smart hardware elements for various domain upgrading. Several IoT-based definitions have been developed to autonomously manage and monitor agricultural areas with minimum human interaction. The primary components, new technology, security problems, obstacles, and emerging developments in the agricultural area are all discussed in depth in this article [20]. The open research challenges for IoT and cloud in smart agriculture is shown below in Figure 5.3.
Information became fragmented since the number of research and initiatives regarding IoT-based sustainable farming grew rapidly, and he related communications systems were not previously studied and addressed in prior reviews. To achieve the wonderful ahead expansion in smart agriculture, more emerging communications systems should be utilized in agricultural production, according to the report [24].
IoT allows for the collection of massive amounts of data through sensors, allowing for improved management of internal operations and, as a consequence, fewer production hazards. The Internet of Things allows for effective monitoring of the agricultural environment. By providing remote monitoring, the Internet of Things allows farmers to watch their farms from numerous places. Decisions may be taken instantly and from any location. In this chapter, the applications of smart agriculture using Cloud and IoT are discussed. Moreover, the cyberattacks on IoT applications in the field of smart agriculture is also highlighted in this chapter. Smart agriculture relies largely on the IoT, which reduces the need for local farmers to do physical work and so boosts productivity in every manner possible. The book chapter highlighted the role of IoT and cloud in smart agriculture. The chapter also enlightened the readers about the research scope of IoT and cloud in Smart Agriculture. The chapter is also helpful for the IoT enthusiasts, cloud security experts, Ph.D. scholars, researchers and students.