A high-performance IoT solution to reduce frost damages in stone fruits

Abstract

[EN] Agriculture is one of the key sectors where technology is opening new opportunities to break up the market. The Internet of Things (IoT) could reduce the production costs and increase the product quality by providing intelligence services via IoT analytics. However, the hard weather conditions and the lack of connectivity in this field limit the successful deployment of such services as they require both, ie, fully connected infrastructures and highly computational resources. Edge computing has emerged as a solution to bring computing power in close proximity to the sensors, providing energy savings, highly responsive web services, and the ability to mask transient cloud outages. In this paper, we propose an IoT monitoring system to activate anti-frost techniques to avoid crop loss, by defining two intelligent services to detect outliers caused by the sensor errors. The former is a nearest neighbor technique and the latter is the k-means algorithm, which provides better quality results but it increases the computational cost. Cloud versus edge computing approaches are analyzed by targeting two different low-power GPUs. Our experimental results show that cloud-based approaches provides highest performance in general but edge computing is a compelling alternative to mask transient cloud outages and provide highly responsive data analytic services in technologically hostile environments.