ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF AN IOT PLATFORM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING APPLIED IN ORNAMENTAL PLANT GREENHOUSES

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is benefiting an increasing number of agricultural producers and organizations in their production processes, improving their long-term efficiency and contributing to sustainable development, as it is estimated that by 2023 there will be close to 12 million agricultural sensors in use globally. Therefore, farmers from different agricultural sectors, including ornamental horticulture, are betting on the early adoption of IoT to improve efficiency in their daily work; even though, in underdeveloped countries, problems in acquiring, accessing and using new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have made this task difficult. This paper describes the architectural design of an IoT platform, used for environmental monitoring in ornamental plant greenhouses, allowing the storage and dynamic visualization of the sensed data in the cloud. The spiral methodology for the development of prototypes underpins the architectural design presented. The design provides an innovative solution by integrating a portable node using Wi-Fi technology and a static sensor network based on the 6LoWPAN standard for sensing, data collection and visualization. As a result, this design will contribute to establish smart agriculture practices to improve quality, productivity, profitability and sustainability in the production of ornamental plants, as well as saving time and money for companies and producers in this sector by reducing the labor effort and risk of human error in data collection.