Design of an Intelligent Management System for Agricultural Greenhouses Based on the Internet of Things

摘要

China is a large agricultural country with the largest population in the world. This creates a high demand for food, which is prompting the study of high quality and high-yielding crops. China's current agricultural production is sufficient to feed the nation; however, compared with developed countries agricultural farming is still lagging behind, mainly due to the fact that the system of growing agricultural crops is not based on maximizing output, the latter would include scientific sowing, irrigation and fertilization. In the past few years many seasonal fruits have been offered for sale in markets, but these crops are grown in traditional backward agricultural greenhouses and large scale changes are needed to modernize production. The reform of small-scale greenhouse agricultural production is relatively easy and could be implemented. The concept of the Agricultural Internet of Things utilizes networking technology in agricultural production, the hardware part of this agricultural IoT include temperature, humidity and light sensors and processors with a large data processing capability; these hardware devices are connected by short-distance wireless communication technology, such as Bluetooth, WIFI or Zigbee. In fact, Zigbee technology, because of its convenient networking and low power consumption, is widely used in the agricultural internet. The sensor network is combined with well-established web technology, in the form of a wireless sensor network, to remotely control and monitor data from the sensors.In this paper a smart system of greenhouse management based on the Internet of Things is proposed using sensor networks and web-based technologies. The system consists of sensor networks and asoftware control system. The sensor network consists of the master control center and various sensors using Zigbee protocols. The hardware control center communicates with a middleware system via serial network interface converters. The middleware communicates with a hardware network using an underlying interface and it also communicates with a web system using an upper interface. The top web system provides users with an interface to view and manage the hardware facilities ; administrators can thus view the status of agricultural greenhouses and issue commands to the sensors through this system in order to remotely manage the temperature, humidity and irrigation in the greenhouses. The main topics covered in this paper are:1. To research the current development of new technologies applicable to agriculture and summarizes the strong points concerning the application of the Agricultural Internet of Things both at home and abroad. Also proposed are some new methods of agricultural greenhouse management.2. An analysis of system requirements, the users’ expectations of the system and the response to needs analysis, and the overall design of the system to determine it’s architecture.3. Using software engineering to ensure that functional modules of the system, as far as possible, meet the requirements of high cohesion and low coupling between modules, also detailed design and implementation of each module is considered.