A Secure System Framework for an Agricultural IoT Application

The applications of Internet of Things (IoT) permeate to every walk of life due to the development of cheap and efficient electronic components and the increasingly ubiquitous network. Thus it is possible to apply the IoT technologies into agriculture commencing an automated farming method. This paper proposes an IoT framework that can be used to assist in traditional agricultural planting. It integrates two major functions including environment data sensing by a wide variety of sensors and environment factors control with some mechanics driven by intelligent circuits. For example, soil moisture can be monitored and controlled by turning on/off sprinkling irrigation equipment when monitored factors are out of a certain range. In addition, this framework is realized at low cost and easy to deploy. A light-weight data encryption transmission solution based on SSL at the TCP/IP layer is designed to ensure the security of data transmission. A practical testbed based on Ali-Cloud is established to carry huge load of communication and data from an actual deployed agricultural IoT application.