An Agricultural-Cloud Based Greenhouse Monitoring System

In recent years, precision agriculture (PA) has become an important issue in agriculture. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) might be a great tool to monitor plant growth in greenhouses, because they can provide spatiotemporal sensing data converted from real world physical/analog signals with high-resolution. In Taiwan, there are many small contracting greenhouse producers who operate their businesses independently. Through the combination of WSNs and cloud computing, sensing data can be automatically recorded in an agricultural cloud. This new service aims to accumulate current and historical data to keep track of plant growth, helping farmers making more informed decisions. Farmers who use the service can benefit from detailed data on factors related to plant growth, such as soil moisture, leaf temperature, leaf width/length, temperature, and humidity. Cloud computing is an appropriate choice because it uses powerful computing servers and distributed resources shared by each measurement site to provide a smart service with useful information. Cloud computing applied to greenhouse monitoring will improve the efficiency of agricultural production and help conventional agriculture move toward PA. Researchers can also further analyze diverse data collected from different sites to provide important information/suggestions to farmers through such a cloud-based monitoring system. To promote the concept of PA, we propose a greenhouse monitoring system with an agriculture cloud. The proposed system collects environmental data from a greenhouse, and the data is stored in a database. A cloud computing service is provided to analyze the data. The proposed system is also able to send an alarm to users.