Deploying wireless sensor networks (WSN) in rural environments such as agricultural fields may present some challenges that affect the communication between the nodes due to the vegetation. These challenges must be addressed when implementing precision agriculture (PA) systems that monitor the fields and estimate irrigation requirements with the gathered data. In this paper, different WSN deployment configurations for a soil monitoring PA system are studied to identify the effects of the rural environment on the signal and to identify the key aspects to consider when designing a PA wireless network. The PA system is described, providing the architecture, the node design, and the algorithm that determines the irrigation requirements. The testbed includes different types of vegetation and on-ground, near-ground, and above-ground ESP32 Wi-Fi node placements. The results of the testbed show high variability in densely vegetated areas. These results are analyzed to determine the theoretical maximum coverage for acceptable signal quality for each of the studied configurations. The best coverage was obtained for the near-ground deployment. Lastly, the aspects of the rural environment and the deployment that affect the signal such as node height, crop type, foliage density, or the form of irrigation are discussed.

Deployment Strategies of Soil Monitoring WSN for Precision Agriculture Irrigation Scheduling in Rural Areas.

The population would reach ten billion by 2050, and experts believe that the agricultural sector needs to boost production by 70% to satisfy the demand. Traditional farming practices rely on primitive technology that creates a yield gap with low productivity. A paradigm shift towards merging new technologies in the agriculture sector would enhance productivity, optimize cost, and encourage sustainable development. In this paper, we review the necessity for the fusion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technological approach in the agricultural domain. We discuss the gap in supply chain management for the Industrial sector and Agricultural sector and identify the issues of vendor-specific production systems. We propose a multimodal communication model for the systematic integration of multi-vendor agricultural production systems. Our model utilizes the Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware to enable communication between heterogeneous production systems to perform farming operations in a coordinated manner. Experimental work is conducted on a small-scale hydroponic farm to evaluate the system performance in terms of throughput, latency, and packet delivery ratio (PDR). The throughput for our proposed DDS system has significantly improved with the use of the BATCH QoS policy for payload size less than 1024 bytes. However, we incur an average latency of approximately 235 microseconds for any payload size. The value of PDR is 1 for any payload size ensuring our system to be reliable. The results suggest that our model can enable interoperability between multi-vendor production systems in real-time while incurring minimum latency.

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IIoT Based Multimodal Communication Model for Agriculture and Agro-Industries

Websites are important in every organisation and tremendous effort is made to design websites that not only look and feel good, but are usable and of high quality. Nevertheless, one critical task is how to evaluate these websites to ensure that users are satisfied with its quality and usability. Although a variety of methods and approaches have been proposed, there is currently an increase in research efforts to model website quality and usability evaluation from the point of view of decision-makers which existing methods do not handle. Thus, this has led to the application of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches in the evaluation of websites to handle complexity in decision-making. This paper, therefore, provides a review of the various MCDM methods that have been used in the usability and quality evaluation of websites. The search strategy which was adopted identified a total of 63 published articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences between 2005 and 2017. From the research questions formulated for the study, the papers were classified into various MCDM approaches, website genre, number and list of criteria used over the years and the localization of websites based on country. Some of the findings showed that the Analytical Hierarchy Process approach integrated with fuzzy logic has been the most common method over the years. In addition, e-commerce websites make up the most common website genre. Besides, currently most active websites are from Turkey and five is the average number of criteria for the evaluation of website quality and usability.

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Multi-criteria decision-making based approaches in website quality and usability evaluation: a systematic review

An output signal from a multi-section wireless relay communication system is equal to the product of the signal envelopes from individual sections. In this paper, a three-sections relay system is considered in the presence of Nakagami-m fading at each section.  First, random variable (RV) is formed as the product of three Nakagami-m RVs. For such product, the moments are determined in the closed forms. The first moment is the mean of the signal; the second moment is the average power of the signal, and the third moment is skewness. Then, the Amount of Fading (AoF) is calculated. AoF is a measure of the severity effect of fading in a particular channel model. Besides, all system performance are shown graphically and the parameters influence has been analyzed and discussed.

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Performance of the Product of Three Nakagami-m Random Variables

Impact of usability on process lead-time in information systems: A case study

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used in agriculture monitoring to improve the quality and productivity of farming. In this application, sensors gather different types of data (i.e., humidity, carbon dioxide level, and temperature) in real-time scenarios. Thus, data gathering, transmission, and rapid response to new circumstances require a secured data mechanism to avoid malicious adversaries. Therefore, this paper focuses on data security from the data origin source to the end-user, and proposes a general data security model that is independent of the network topology and structure, and can be widely used in the agriculture monitoring application. The developed model considers practical aspects, the architecture of the sensor node, as well as the necessity to save energy while ensuring data security, and optimize the model through the application of organizational and technical measures. The model evaluation is conducted through simulation in terms of energy consumption. The result shows that the proposed model ensures good data security at the cost of a slight increase in energy consumption at receiver and sender nodes, and energy consumption per bit, up to 2%, 7%, and 1.3%, respectively, due to overhead added for authentication in the network.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/23/6747/pdf

Wireless Sensor Network in Agriculture: Model of Cyber Security.

Wireless sensors networks (WSNs) are characterized by flexibility and scalability in any environment. These networks are increasingly used in agricultural and industrial environments and have a dual role in data collection from sensors and transmission to a monitoring system, as well as enabling the management of the monitored environment. Environment management depends on trust in the data collected from the surrounding environment, including the time of data creation. This paper proposes a trust model for monitoring humidity and moisture in agricultural and industrial environments. The proposed model uses a digital signature and public key infrastructure (PKI) to establish trust in the data source, i.e., the trust in the sensor. Trust in data generation is essential for real-time environmental monitoring and subsequent analyzes, thus timestamp technology is implemented here to further ensure that gathered data are not created or changed after the assigned time. Model validation is performed using the Castalia network simulator by testing energy consumption at the receiver and sender nodes and the delay incurred by creating or validating a trust token. In addition, validation is also performed using the Ascertia TSA Crusher application for the time consumed to obtain a timestamp from the free TSA. The results show that by applying different digital signs and timestamps, the trust entity of the WSN improved significantly with an increase in power consumption of the sender node by up to 9.3% and receiver node by up to 126.3% for a higher number of nodes, along with a packet delay of up to 15.6% and an average total time consumed up to 1.186 s to obtain the timestamp from the best chosen TSA, which was as expected.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/11/3636/pdf

Trustworthy Wireless Sensor Networks for Monitoring Humidity and Moisture Environments.

Classification schemes and taxonomy of request have focused only on business or software requirements defined by general non-functional requests. Public key infrastructure (PKI), as a complex system, requires special attention in the process of identification and definition of requests in all parts of the system. Requests efficiently identified and defined are the basis for successful PKI development and implementation. This study proposes a new classification scheme of requirements that enable effective identification of PKI requests in all system development life cycle phases. The proposed classification scheme has been designed in a way that can be used both by organisations just introducing a PKI system in their business operations, as well as organisations developing and implementing the PKI. Although there are more classification schemes and taxonomy of requests, the proposed classification scheme is the optimum solution for identification and definition of PKI system requests, as well as a good basis for testing, verification and validation of the PKI final product.

Classification as an approach to public key infrastructure requirements analysis

The requirement quality affects product development at all lifecycle stages, as well as the end product. Poorly defined requirements bring to extended deadlines, increased financial costs, even to project disruption. Current researches related to the good quality of requirements include characteristics of good requirements and the development of new elicitation techniques. Requirement quality evaluation should be tailored both to the professionals and users who defined requirements according to their needs. Therefore, the model is designed for requirement quality measurement based on the characteristics of good requirements by application of the Generalized Prioritized Fuzzy Constraint Satisfaction Problem. The model enables the participation of selected characteristics of good requirements in quality evaluation, according to priorities. The evaluator obtains information if the requirement satisfies the given quality satisfaction threshold based on the degree of fulfillment of selected characteristics of a good requirement. The model is applied to all types of requirements, as well as to the evaluation of requirements at all software development lifecycle stages.

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Ivan Vulić

Papers

Wireless Sensor Network in Agriculture: Model of Cyber Security.

Performance of the Product of Three Nakagami-m Random Variables

Trustworthy Wireless Sensor Networks for Monitoring Humidity and Moisture Environments.

Classification as an approach to public key infrastructure requirements analysis

The approach to measurement of requirement quality by application of generalized prioritized fuzzy constraint satisfaction problem