As the digital village strategy is becoming more profound, real-time and sophisticated environmental monitoring has emerged as a significant resource in the protection of rural ecology and green development. The traditional environmental monitoring terminals are however characterized by high energy consumption, intense computational pressure, high reliance on the cloud and inability to adjust to the complex and resource-limited nature of the rural environment. In order to solve these problems, the present paper develops a lightweight edge computing environmental monitoring terminal that is applicable in the digital village setting. First, the general terminal architecture is built upon a collaborative model termed a terminal-edge-cloud which comprises a perception layer, a light edge computing layer as well as a cloud management layer. Second, the lightness in hardware design is attained by using low-power components and combining several sensor modules, whereas the lightness in software design is ensured with the help of model compression, simplification of the algorithms, and resource scheduling schemes. Lastly, the terminal performance is put to test by doing the actual deployment in rural settings. In the experimental results, the terminal also demonstrates good stability and lightweight properties of all three scenarios, with response times in all cases not exceeding 100 milliseconds, and the shortest response time is 82 milliseconds in the plain farmland scenario. The standby power consumption of the terminal is less than 10 watts and the peak operating power consumption of the terminal is 18 watts, which is suitable to be used in low power consumption outdoor use in digital villages. This is essentially capable of meeting the real time environmental monitoring requirements of the digital villages, which offers technical aid to ecological governance and digital transformation in the countryside.
Liu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.