Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in agriculture to provide farmers with a large amount of information. Precision agriculture (PA) is a management strategy that employs information technology to improve quality and production. Utilizing wireless sensor technologies and management tools can lead to a highly effective, green agriculture. Based on PA management, the same routine to a crop regardless of site environments can be avoided. From several perspectives, field management can improve PA, including the provision of adequate nutrients for crops and the wastage of pesticides for the effective control of weeds, pests, and diseases. This review outlines the recent applications of WSNs in agriculture research as well as classifies and compares various wireless communication protocols, the taxonomy of energy-efficient and energy harvesting techniques for WSNs that can be used in agricultural monitoring systems, and comparison between early research works on agriculture-based WSNs. The challenges and limitations of WSNs in the agricultural domain are explored, and several power reduction and agricultural management techniques for long-term monitoring are highlighted. These approaches may also increase the number of opportunities for processing Internet of Things (IoT) data.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/8/1781/pdf

Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks for Precision Agriculture: A Review.

List of illustrations Some useful constants and units Introduction 1. The facts which call for explanation. A sketch of the surface distribution of the meteorological elements over the globe 2. Some statistical and thermal relationships 3. Water-vapour in the atmosphere. The ascent of damp air 4. Thermodynamics of the atmosphere 5. Radiation 6. Radiation in the troposphere 7. Radiative equilibrium and the stratosphere 8. The general equations of motion 9. Motion under balanced forces: the gradient wind 10. Surfaces of discontinuity 11. The general aspects of turbulence 12. Turbulence in the atmosphere: the eddies as diffusing agencies 13. The classification of winds 14. The transformations of energy in the atmosphere 15. The growth of cyclic circulations and of pressure inequalities in the atmosphere 16. The idea of air masses 17. The Polar front and its relation to the development of cyclones 18. Anticyclones 19. The general circulation of the atmosphere Appendix Index of names Index of subjects.

Physical and Dynamical Meteorolgy. By D. Brunt. Second edition. Pp. xxiv, 428. 25s. 1939. (Cambridge)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology.

/pdf/security-of-the-internet-of-things-vulnerabilities-attacks-5f8nyperis.pdf

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Countermeasures

The average US consumer watches TV for almost five hours a day. While the majority of viewed content is still broadcast TV programming, the share of the time-shifted content is on the rise. One-third of US viewers currently use a digital video recorder like device, but trends indicate that more consumers are migrating to the Web to watch their favorite shows and movies. Increasingly, the Web is coming to digital TV, which incorporates movie downloads and streaming via Web protocols. In this first part of a two-part article, the authors describe both conventional and emerging streaming solutions using Web and non-Web protocols.

Watching Video over the Web: Part 1: Streaming Protocols

Industrial and IP-enabled low-power wireless networking technologies are converging, resulting in the Industrial Internet of Things. On the one hand, low-power wireless solutions are available today that answer the strict reliability and power consumption requirements of industrial applications. These solutions are based on Time- Synchronized Channel Hopping, a medium access control technique at the heart of industrial standards such as the WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, and layer 1 and 2 standards such as IEEE802.15.4e. On the other hand, a range of standards have been published to allow low-power wireless devices to communicate using the Internet Protocol (IP), thereby becoming true “fingers of the Internet,” and greatly simplifying their integration into existing networks. This article acknowledges the standardization effort to combine those capabilities. The networks resulting from this convergence exhibit reliability and power consumption performances compatible with demanding industrial applications, while being easy to integrate, and following the end-to-end paradigm of today's Internet. In particular, this article presents the work being done in 6TiSCH, a newly-formed working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is standardizing the mechanisms making the Industrial Internet of Things a reality.

6TiSCH: deterministic IP-enabled industrial internet (of things)

In smart factory applications, sensors, actuators, field devices, and supervision systems often require a high degree of reliability and timeliness in information exchange. The quality of service provided by the underlying industrial communication network is a key requisite for quality of control. In this context, the WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and IEEE802.15.4e time-slotted channel hopping standards contribute novel protocols to support quasi-deterministic services, based on wireless short-range communication technologies. The recently created IETF 6TiSCH working group binds IPv6 to this market. Within the 6TiSCH architecture, the 6top sublayer manages the way communication resources are scheduled in time and frequency. The on-the-fly (OTF) bandwidth reservation module plays a complementary role; it is a distributed approach for adapting the scheduled bandwidth to network requirements. This paper first describes the OTF module and its interactions with the 6top sublayer. It then presents the simulation results of the OTF, drawn from a realistic 50-sensor mote multi-hop network that models a small industrial plant. Results show that the OTF can attain an end-to-end latency of the order of a second, with over 99% end-to-end reliability. The first real-world OTF implementation in OpenWSN is presented to demonstrate that it can easily be added within the 6TiSCH architecture.

/pdf/on-the-fly-bandwidth-reservation-for-6tisch-wireless-5crjbcp0do.pdf

On-the-Fly Bandwidth Reservation for 6TiSCH Wireless Industrial Networks

While the deployment of WiFi networks continue to grow at an explosive rate, the multicast multimedia delivery service on WiFi compliant devices is still in its early stage of development The real culprit is the IEEE 80211 MAC protocol, and in particular, the absence of feedback mechanism when multicast is used Recently, a leader-based mechanism has been proposed to overcome this problem In this paper, we measure the characteristics of the legacy multicast transmission mechanism and analyze its flaws Then, we study the performance of the leader-based approach and compare its performance with the standard multicast service The analysis is done on a large set of measurements made with our wireless testbed Such measurements are an important complement to previous simulation studies and help in the design of the best mechanism to replace the faulty legacy multicast mechanism Our study confirms that the leader-based mechanism outperforms the standard open-loop multicast mechanism while keeping fairness among other traffic

/pdf/multicast-in-802-11-wlans-an-experimental-study-54ect9y90w.pdf

Multicast in 802.11 WLANs: an experimental study

This specification defines the 6TiSCH Minimal Scheduling Function
(MSF). This Scheduling Function describes both the behavior of a node
when joining the network, and how the communication schedule is
managed in a distributed fashion. MSF is built upon the 6TiSCH
Operation Sublayer Protocol (6P) and the Minimal Security Framework
for 6TiSCH.

6TiSCH Minimal Scheduling Function (MSF)

Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture applications have evolved to solve several relevant problems from producers Here, we describe a component of an IoT-enabled frost prediction system We follow current approaches for prediction that use machine learning algorithms trained by past readings of temperature and humidity sensors to predict future temperatures However, contrary to current approaches, we assume that the surrounding thermodynamical conditions are informative for prediction For that, a model was developed for each location, including in its training information of sensor readings of all other locations, autonomously selecting the most relevant ones (algorithm dependent) We evaluated our approach by training regression and classification models using several machine learning algorithms, many already proposed in the literature for the frost prediction problem, over data from five meteorological stations spread along the Mendoza Province of Argentina Given the scarcity of frost events, data was augmented using the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) The experimental results show that selecting the most relevant neighbors and training the models with SMOTE reduces the prediction errors of both regression predictors for all five locations, increases the performance of Random Forest classification predictors for four locations while keeping it unchanged for the remaining one, and produces inconclusive results for logistic regression predictor These results demonstrate the main claim of these works: that thermodynamic information of neighboring locations can be informative for improving both regression and classification predictions, but also are good enough to suggest that the present approach is a valid and useful resource for decision makers and producers

/pdf/prediction-of-frost-events-using-machine-learning-and-iot-3lbd14ynct.pdf

Diego Dujovne

Papers

6TiSCH: deterministic IP-enabled industrial internet (of things)

On-the-Fly Bandwidth Reservation for 6TiSCH Wireless Industrial Networks

Multicast in 802.11 WLANs: an experimental study

6TiSCH Minimal Scheduling Function (MSF)

Prediction of Frost Events Using Machine Learning and IoT Sensing Devices