ABSTRACT
In
Northern Nigeria, irrigation systems are operated manually. Agriculture has
over the years been practiced primitively by farmers, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. This is due to the absence of intelligent
technological know-how where its practice could be
leveraged upon. Agricultural practice is constrained by some major challenges ranging from traditional way
of farming, understating of concepts, practices, policy, environmental and
financial factors. The aim of this study was to optimize an IoT-based model for smart agriculture and irrigation water management. The objectives of the study were
to: design, implement, test and evaluate the performance of the optimized
IoT-based model for smart agriculture and irrigation water management. The
method used in the study was the prototyping model. The system was designed
using balsamiq application tools. The system has a login page, dashboard,
system USE-CASE diagrams, actuators page, sensor page and application interface
design. Justinmind tool was used to show the
flow of information in the system, which included data input and output, data
stores and all the sub-processes the data moves through.
The Optimized IoT model was implemented using four core platforms namely, ReactJS
Frontend Application development platform, Amazon web services IoT Core
backend, Arduino Development platform for developing sensor nodes and Python
programming language for the actuator node based on Raspberry Pi board. When
compared with the existing system, the results show that the optimized system
is better than the existing system in accuracy of measurement, irrigation water
management, operation node, platform access, real-time video, user friendly and
efficiency. The study successfully optimized an IoT-based model for smart agriculture and irrigation water management. The study introduced the modern way of irrigation farming in the 21st century against the traditional or primitive
way of irrigation farming that involved intensive human participation.