Experiences in building an IoT infrastructure for agriculture education

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly spreading, and creating unprecedented opportunities in verticals such as agriculture, healthcare, industry and home automation. Agriculture education needs to produce professionals who are able to make use of these opportunities presented by the IoT. Towards this goal, we are building an IoT infrastructure to support University education in Agriculture and Science. Our aim is to build an infrastructure which allows rapid building of multiple diverse IoT applications with minimum technical skills. The proposed solution also supports heterogeneous sensor devices, and is scalable to handle increasing sensor populations. In this paper we present a software-centric description of the design and implementation of our IoT solution. We present details of the resultant system, discuss lessons learnt during the project and also identify the directions in which we are continuing the work.