Smart and Precision Polyhouse Farming Using Visible Light Communication and Internet of Things

Abstract

Recently, Polyhouse farming has taken the place of traditional farming. This technique reduces dependency on rainfall and dramatically changing environmental conditions and makes the optimum use of land and water resources in a controlled environment. Manually controlled system requires a lot of attention and care. To overcome this limitation, novel technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor network (SN) can be used. Case studies show that use of electromagnetic or radio spectrum for communication degrades the growth and quality of crops. The visible light communication (VLC) provides an effective solution to this problem using visible light spectrum for communication. VLC outperforms when compared with traditional communication techniques in terms of available frequency spectrum, reliability, security, and energy efficiency. LED source used in VLC acts as communication element as well as is used for illumination. This paper proposes use of sensor network to sense the data like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and luminosity along with VLC as a medium of communication from node to the network gateway. IoT performs its part in automating polyhouse countermeasures and fertilizer suggestion based on the data processed in cloud for Business Intelligence and Analytics. Thus, the proposed system will ensure automated and sustainable polyhouse farming using VLC and IoT.