2011 International Joint Conference on Service Sciences

The Application of Cloud Computing and The Internet of Things in Agriculture and Forestry

Yifan Bo, Haiyan Wang*

School of Information Science and Technology Beijing Forestry University Beijing, China

wanghaiyan76@126.com
AbstractCloud Computing and The Internet of Things are the two hot points in the Internet field. The application of the two new technologies is in hot discussion and research, but quite less on the field of agriculture and forestry. Thus, in this paper, we analyze the study and application of Cloud Computing and The Internet of Things on agriculture and forestry. Then we put forward an idea that making a combination of the two techniques and analyze the feasibility, applications and future prospect of the combination. Keywords-Cloud Computing; The Internet of Things; agriculture; forestry

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the rapid network development, the data volume is increasing at a surprising speed as well. Recently, Cloud Computing and The Internet of things are the hottest topic in the Internet industry. Cloud Computing has its advantages in large scale, low price, virtuality and excellent scalability, while The Internet of things main technique such as RFID, sensor and 3S have already been applied in a certain scale. Many famous IT enterprises like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Dell have already successfully built their own cloud and offer cloud service in software development, data storage, information searching, information management and so on. However, peoples acquaintance toward Cloud computing and The Internet of Things are not enough in agriculture and forestry industry. Agriculture and forestry are the two basic industries closely related to our national welfare and the people's livelihood, whose standard of informatization is vital to our country. The introduction of the two new techniques would be a great breakthrough in modern agriculture and forestry field. II. APPLICATION OF CLOUD COMPUTING IN AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY

international advanced Cloud Computing architecture and web-based internet service mode with the SaaS service model, we can build an unimpeded high speed information system among the government, service supplier and farmers to speed up the pace of agriculture informatization. Secondly, taking the infomation service demand of "Three Rural Issues" in our country into consideration,we could bulid a cloud service platform for the information service in countryside which can enable data sharing, remote data storage, interaction with farmers, agriculture experts consultation and peasant household management. As Cloud Computing has already offered users development environment as a service, the grass-roots department just need to rent the service from the supplier for a small amount of money in order to build its own software based on it. Whats more, the grass-roots departments dont need to build computer rooms or buy lots of software and hardware because all they demand can be abtained from the cloud service supplier through the network, which reduce their difficulty in building service portals and maintenance in great degree and overcome shortages for talents and finance. Then finally impeling the information service in countryside to implement leap-forward development, which is especially pivotal to underdeveloped regions[1]. B. Forest pests control China is one of the countries which suffer from the most serious forest pests infection in the world. In recent decades, the loss caused by forest pests is far more severe than that by forest fires, so forest pests forecasting is of great significance and quite necissary. Forest pests forecasting work is based on large sum of accumulated forest pests data, however, the data information is growing so fast that we meet an increasingly large amount of pests control work. The disadvantages in the existing forest pests MIS such as the high cost and low utilization also become difficult to overcome. As a result, we need to solve those problems in forest pests control as soon as possible. While, Cloud Computing is a good way to deal with resources using and management. Its mainly applied in huge enterprises nowadays, but the way between enterprises and forest pests control are so different, for the latter involves forestry administration from national to local levels throughout our country. Cloud computing can be roughly divided into Public Cloud and Private Cloud. However,

As to the study on application of Cloud Computing in agriculture and forestry, both the domestic and the abroad have made some theoretical achievements. A. The information service in countryside Cloud application services or Software as a Service (SaaS) have advantages such as low upfront costs, maximised efficiency and service availability. By combining

* Corresponding author. Tel.:+86-10-623-382-46 Supported by the Construction of Knowledge Organization Systems and Application Demonstration on Abroad Scientific&Technical Literature Infomation.

978-0-7695-4421-2/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IJCSS.2011.40

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neither of these two clouds suits pests control. Shaocan Jiang, Luming Fang, and Xiaoying Huang from Zhejiang Forestry University put forward an idea of Special Cloud Computing in forest pests control. Special Cloud Computing consists of a special forestry administration and the cloud computing provider[2]. The model of special cloud is shown in Fig. 1( C: a special forestry administration P: the cloud computing provider).

Do: Gathering work results sharing data (Farming equipment, agricultural chemicals, fertilizers, insect pests). Check Performing progress management and patrol the cultivated plots (sensors or cameras) Act Making any necessary modifications to the plans. Based on this process of agriculture production, basic sensing and knowledge management techniques are mainly used to provide Cloud services. The model of PDCA cycle and cloud services in agriculture is shown in Fig. 2.

Figure 1. The model of special cloud computing in forest pests control[2]

From Fig. 1, we can see that in special cloud, the forestry administration is the data center which provides service mostly for professional pests control (Software, Core Calculation, R&D Platform, Forecast System, ES, DSS, 3S, etc.) and the cloud computing provider provides an effective cloud computing solution. Additionally, forestry administration is both a provider of special cloud computing and its user. In special cloud, one of its key features is Super Operation. It integrates free scattered resources in the cloud and endows users with great operating power. With special cloud computing, experts can create prediction models in real time notwithstanding the dense forest and miscellaneous pests and non-linear relationships between pest ecological groups. This special cloud combined server, network and various kinds of high and new technologies into special cloud computing platform by virtualizing them seamlessly and supply them to all forestry administrators through SAAS and PAAS. This mode of lease or pay-as-you-go is an ideal model to the grassroots forestry administrators for it helps them omit the heavy and annoying work to maintain all kinds of software. On the other hand, PAAS offers an integrated environment to design, develop, test, deploy and support custom applications [2]. C. Agriculture production Information about application on agriculture production is not abundant in both domestic and abroad industries. Recently, Mitsuyoshi Hori, Eiji Kawashima and Tomihiro Yamazaki from Japan carried on a study on the connection point between agriculture and Cloud Computing [3]. Firstly, they regarded the process of agriculture production as a PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle: Plan Drawing up production and operation plans (including planting, cultivation, materials, human resources and yield).

Figure 2. PDCA cycle and Cloud services in agriculture [3]

Production data which includes weather and soil data, GPS data, image data, worker observations and cultivated plots of land is routinely collected. To obtain advice and suggestions by analyzing the stored data, analysis engines such as data miners are operated on this large amount of data in the Cloud. In Cloud Computing, the maintenance work for thousands or even millions of users can be done simply by amending and adding to the software on a single system in the Cloud center instead of an engineer having to visit the office to do all this work. Whats more, therere no disparities in the software versions used by different users, which reduce maintenance problems [3]. III. APPLICATION OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT) IN AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY

The widespread application of The Internet of Things (IOT) can not only change the extensive management mode in agriculture, but also develop the strength in epidemic control for animals and plants to ensure the safety of the agricultural products quality. So its of great significance to intensify research efforts on the application of IOT in agriculture and forestry. In recent years, IOT has been applied in some agriculture and forestry fields. Now well give a basic overview of it. A. Safety of agriculture product The public becomes anxious about the food safety for some frequently occurred agriculture products safety accidents in recent years. To minimize the hidden danger of

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it, we should enhance the management on the process of agriculture production. Food safety traceability system is an application in IOT. For example, all the pork into a farmer's market will be put on an electronic chip to trace its production, processing, wholesale and retail. Consumers can get a receipt which contains retrospective food safety code to know all the information on origin place, abattoir and quality supervision about the product [4]. Table shows some cases on the application of IOT in ensuring safety of agriculture product.
TABLE I. CASES ON THE APPLICATION OF IOT IN ENSURING SAFETY
OF AGRICULTURE PRODUCT

based on IOT in their vineyard. Electronic tags are installed all through the vineyard to collect temperature data. Workers could know the best time to pick grapes by analysing the collected data and deal with grapes in different temperature states in their own adaptable ways. C. Intelligent cultivation control Intelligent cultivation control is a significant sign in modern agriculture and forestry. We can get parameters which have influence on agriculture parks environment in time and monitor the whole parks by installing an ecological information wireless sensor as well as other intelligent control system. According to the parameters, the workers control infrastructures like irrigation system and heat preservation system to make sure the perfect growing conditions for crops [6]. What's more, by combining intelligent analyzer with gang control, all the demand for crops growing process can be fulfilled adequately to reach high yield and get good quality. Table shows some cases on the application of IOT in intelligent cultivation control.
TABLE II. CASES ON THE APPLICATION OF IOT IN INTELLIGENT
CULTIVATION CONTROL

Organization Dingshan Professional Cooperation, Jiangsu Province, China

An Pin Live Fish S/T Center, Taiwan, China

Arizona States

in

United

The United Agriculture Department

States

Application Performance Supervising pork quality by putting a sensor tag on the ear of one pig. The sensor tags apply IOT technique into the food safety traceability system to make sure that all products have their own traceable archives. Applying RFID in live fish production record. Consumers can know fishs growing record for the retailer will offer information on the whole product process with the RFID chip tag on the live fish. Tracing lettuce by RFID. University of Arizona Science & Technology Park in USA helps farmers estimate soil state with RFID and GPS technique, enabling retailers to trace supply chain, reaping time, reaping position and other information about lettuce. Ratifying UHF (Ultra High Frequency) tags on livestock track-and-trace combined with AIN. NAIS is a voluntary project which gives each animal a unique AIN code for tracing work to quickly get that animals living record when polluted meat or sick livestock occurred.

Organization

Zhi Yi Zhejiang China

Hacienda, Province,

B. Agriculture information transmission and Intelligent Detection First, Modern agriculture cannot develop without information. Information like climate, soil acility and alkalinity, seeds selecting, fertilizer, insects control, seeding cultivation and reaping are so vital to farmers. With real-time sensor to monitor crops condition in irrigation and soil air and gather data about temperature, humidity, wind force, atmosphere, rainfall capacity, nitrogen concentration and pH value of soil to make correct prediction, it finally helps farmers to cultivating wisely and avoids disasters. Secondly, by making use of IOT technique, we can discover animals demand rules for growing environment with observation and analysis on accurate data of their living habits and health conditions. Thirdly, by using IOT technique to monitor forest environment, a forest fire alarm system can be built with nodes spread all over the forest. When a fire happens, nodes would send detail information about position of fire sources and fire behaviour to related department through collaboration [5]. Grape farmers in the Niagara Peninsula in Canada and ice wine producers develop a temperature monitoring system

Chenzhou Modern Agriculture Tobacco Demonstration Base, Hunan Province,China

Minnesota USA

Pasture,

Application Performance Applying automatic motoring and intelligent control technology into management on fruits growth. Zhi Yi installed controllers and nodes on cement stand columns in greenhouses. All the irrigation and fertilizer work are automatically operated on demand in grapes different growing period. This system has increased management efficiency greatly and saved at least 1/3 total cost. Discovering the demand rules for temperature, water, sunlight and soil through real-time sensing and history data storage. Intelligent analyse and accurate intervention enable tobacco follow manual control and finally reach high yield and get perfect effect. Implying RFID into condensed milk system to manage cows. Sensors could surveillance the colour and temperature of milk and the states of cows and breast pump. The system will make segregation and make further analyse once bad milk is found. It not only increases the milk production but also monitor the quality of milk.

D. Precision Irrigation Taking advantages of IOT can provide decision support for precise irrigation systems. Xu Gang, Chen Liping, Zhang Ruirui and Guo Jianhua from National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, China made a research on the structure of Internet of things based on precision irrigation [7]. Sensor network gets access to the Internet by service-based data sharing which enable users to obtain farm parameters directly. Collected data is sent to the server by sink node. Apparently deviant data caused by communication faults or sensor temperature drifts can be dealt with by filter. This system has been deployed into Beijing and Xinjiang, and the server is in Beijing. The systems main work is to monitor wheat and corn farm and

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collect soil moisture, air temperature and light data. All the farm parameters and farm machinery usage can be viewed remotely by users through B/S, C/S or PDA, to promote irrigation efficiency. E. Forest Identification and Tree Tracking Using sensors can provide more real-time data that are more reliable about soil moisture content, growing status, pest plague and even offer reasonable suggestions on fire preventing according to temperature and wind force. The main applications of IOT in forestry are forest identification and tree tracking with IR sensor and RFID technique. Table shows some cases on the application of IOT in forest identification and tree tracking.
TABLE III. CASES ON THE APPLICATION OF IOT IN FOREST IDENTIFICATION AND TREE TRACKING
Application Performance Taking advantages of bar codes, IR sensor, RFID and wireless transmission network technique to send data collected during wood production to the data centre in time, thus realizing wood identification throughout the production process. They also use the front-end sensor to collect data on forest ecological environment [8]. Tracking woods and manages forest with RFID tags. RFID tags were either stapled to a tree or log, or nailed in with a hammer, to determine the best method of attachment. RFID-enabled devices were utilized to confirm the ID number at the various checkpoints along the supply chain as trees were felled, and as logs were processed. [9]. Integrating their proprietary system that includes a GPS / GIS plantation-wide mapping system where each Koa tree planted will be equipped with RFID. The RFID program means that each individual tree is equipped with a computer signature, which will track ownership, growth, maintenance, lumber-yield and pedigree for the tree owner [10]. Using RFID systems to combat illegal timber trade. RFID tags affixed trees in the forest. Helveta software can use timber supply chain in real-time tracking of different areas. The software incorporated into the rules and regulations of each country to ensure that timber is legal and reasonable source of the supply chain to ensure that no illegal logging of timber or no timber stolen behavior [11].

Organization

larger support platform to fulfill its level of demand, which is a perfect integration point. By analyzing the function and performance demand of IOT platform, we could find it shows Cloud Computing characteristics in the following three aspects: The future IOT platform is required to store huge amount of data collected by billions of sensor device and do with tasks like gathering, splitting, statistic and backup. All this demands storage resource with resilient growth and powerful parallel computing ability on a large scale. Large changes in resources load. IOT provides computing power based on platform service which can be regarded as PAAS (Platformas-a-Service). According to these characteristics, we can consider introducing Cloud Computing into developing the IOT service platform [12]. B. Current Application of IOT Based on Cloud Computing China Internet of things Cloud Computing Centre is constructed by Dawning Information Industry, which is the leading of national high-performance computers, and Wuxi New District of Jiangsu Province. Its taken as the trend of future development of information industry. In the plan of the Wuxi Internet of things cloud computing , it will provide cloud data centres in the application chain incubation, and become the core gathering area of east China in cloud computing in 3 to 5 years. The Cloud Computing Centre peak performance can reach one hundred trillion times / second, providing application supports for the cloud computing services for the relevant research institutes and enterprises [13]. At present, a kind of "Construction Agriculture Insect Biological Control Expert Service Platform based on IOT" has realized real-time monitoring and control work towards pest diseases effectively. The platform is led by Beijing Plant Protection Station, which consists of IOT data collection and monitor facilities, intelligent Computing Clouds platform, expert service platform, system administrators and service terminals. The IOT data collection and monitor facilities use wireless sensor to collect the real-time data on impact factors, video and images, then make data transmission to the expert service platform through China mobile TD/GPRS network as the most basic statistical analysis basis. Intelligent Computing Clouds platform processes information with intelligent algorithm, establishes pest warning model base, crop growth model base and other information databases to realize the real-time monitoring the pests. The platform has made preliminary test on more than 100 greenhouses in Beijing and Hebei Province and verified the reliability and accuracy of this system. C. Existing Problems The application of IOT based on Cloud Computing is not widespread recently and there are still some problems to be solved. 1) The implementation and promotion of IPv6 and setting various IOT standards: One of the foundations of

Zhanhe Forestry Bureau, Heilongjiang Province, China

Forestry Department of Peninsular Malaysia

Hawaiian Hardwoods

Legacy

Oxford Technology Company Helveta

IV.

ANALYSE ON THE INTERNET OF THINGS BASED ON CLOUD COMPUTING

From all the study analyzed above, the application of both Cloud Computing and The Internet of Things in agriculture and forestry has their own mode and features. Well, if we combine Cloud Computing with IOT together, it may be a great breakthrough for us. Then, how much is the possibility of their integration? A. The integration point of IOT and Cloud Computing The present situation is Cloud Computing need to go from the conceptual to application, while IOT requires a

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IOT development. Without these standards, IOT is just a "castles in the air" [14]. 2) Scale cost of IOT facilities: It makes nonsense without scale for IOT. When IOT comes to a certain scale, various kinds of elec-tronic equipment, prices for sensing device and implementing difficulty are very crucial. Furthermore, the realization for this kind of scale in agriculture and forestry still needs time. 3) The construction for Cloud Computing center need to reach a certain scale: Except for some few enterprises have their own private cloud, at present there is not many large public clouds. In agriculture and forestry, it is even more so. 4) Data center needs more reliable virtualized platform support: The data center of IOT Based on Cloud Computing needs more reliable virtualized platform support, and calls for higher request for the planning, construction, operation, maintenance and management as well as energy conservation, environmental protection, high reliability, high usability, safety, manageability and high-performance towards it[15]. 5) Security and risk: IOT Based on Cloud Computing has realized efficiency, flexibility and convenience. While, there still exists many uncertainties in human or information security, at the same time, distribution balance of interests and the influence on human behaviour and moral still exist certain risks and uncertainties on the formation process of value chain[15]. D. The prospect about IOT Based on Cloud Computing The view that integration of Cloud Computing and IOT is one of the development trends in Internet field has been recognized by many professionals. The combination of both reduces initial cost and solves the mass data storage and computational problems for the scale development of future IOT. Thus Clouds Computing will truly go from concept to application and the IOT will also get larger support platform to meet its scale demand. If existing problems in technique, scale and security are successfully solved, it will guide the development of Internet and forms a certain scale in the next few years, at the same time, providing unprecedented opportunities for development in agriculture and forestry as well as various industries in our society. V. CONCLUSION

cultivation control and precise irrigation. IOT also brings great convenience to forestry, especially in the forest identification, wood tracking management and so on. With the rapid development of Internet, integration of Computing Clouds and The Internet of Things has become a tendency, if we can successfully resolved the problems at present and eliminate development bottleneck, the operation platform provide unprecedented new opportunity for will for agriculture and forestry, and even all areas in our society. REFERENCES
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This paper focused on the study on the application of Cloud Computing and The Internet of Things in agriculture and forestry. Because computing clouds has its advantages in large scale, virtualization, high reliability, expansibility, economical and practical and high efficiency, the construction of public cloud in agriculture and forestry can promote resources sharing, cost saving and construct systems with high efficiency. The Internet of Things, as an important support for realizing intensive, high-yield, high-quality, high-efficiency, ecological and safe agricultural, its main techniques such as RFID, photo acoustic electromagnetic sensors, "3S" technology, laser scanner, etc, can make great breakthrough on agricultural product safety, agriculture information transmission, intelligent detecting, intelligent

[13]

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[15]

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