Holistic IoT and cloud-based telemetry architecture for proactive fire monitoring in smart agriculture

The rise of harsh weather conditions has made the crop yield vulnerable to fire and variable losses. To address this issue, this article proposes a real-time fire monitoring system which is appropriate for modern smart agriculture. This system utilizes cloud computing technology, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, telemetry technology, and embedded systems technology to monitor the status in the fields in real time every second. The system has three layers. The first is the IoT device layer, which is composed of flame and smoke sensors, a raspberry pi 3 B+, and a network gateway. The second is the ThingsBoard cloud layer, which is used for efficient processing of large amounts of information. The third is the telemetry layer, which is used for aggregation of the information collected. One of the advantages of the system is the use of a customized aggregation algorithm, which uses sensor information and sends the results in JavaScript object notation (JSON) format using the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol. The system was tested in the fields and performed well. It recorded an accuracy of 96.1% in detecting fire in 50 tests, with the rate of false alarms being below 2.8%. It is also clear from the tests that the system can differentiate between true and false alarms. The proposed system sends information to the cloud every two seconds, with an average response time of below 300 milliseconds. The results show that the monitoring system has a reliability rate of over 98%. The results also demonstrate that the Raspberry Pi used in this study had a stable and reasonable central processing unit (CPU) and memory usage rate. Compared to other previously proposed prototypes, the proposed system for monitoring has the advantage of incorporating resource telemetry and fire detection within the same IoT and cloud computing environment, a notable improvement towards sustainable agriculture and food security, as well as the mitigation of agricultural risks.