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. 2016 Nov 23;16(11):1979.
doi: 10.3390/s16111979.

A Testbed to Evaluate the FIWARE-Based IoT Platform in the Domain of Precision Agriculture

Ramón Martínez  1 , Juan Ángel Pastor  2 , Bárbara Álvarez  3 , Andrés Iborra  4
Affiliations

A Testbed to Evaluate the FIWARE-Based IoT Platform in the Domain of Precision Agriculture

Ramón Martínez et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) represent one of the most promising technologies for precision farming. Over the next few years, a significant increase in the use of such systems on commercial farms is expected. WSNs present a number of problems, regarding scalability, interoperability, communications, connectivity with databases and data processing. Different Internet of Things middleware is appearing to overcome these challenges. This paper checks whether one of these middleware, FIWARE, is suitable for the development of agricultural applications. To the authors' knowledge, there are no works that show how to use FIWARE in precision agriculture and study its appropriateness, its scalability and its efficiency for this kind of applications. To do this, a testbed has been designed and implemented to simulate different deployments and load conditions. The testbed is a typical FIWARE application, complete, yet simple and comprehensible enough to show the main features and components of FIWARE, as well as the complexity of using this technology. Although the testbed has been deployed in a laboratory environment, its design is based on the analysis of an Internet of Things use case scenario in the domain of precision agriculture.

Keywords: FIWARE; Internet of Things; precision agriculture; wireless sensor networks.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Context element conceptual diagram.
Figure 2
Figure 2
FIWARE IoT architecture.
Figure 3
Figure 3
FMS envisioned based on FIWARE IoT architecture (lower part drawings are from [57]).
Figure 4
Figure 4
A testbed to evaluate the performance of the FIWARE platform.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Results obtained using the blocking method: (a) Higher data transfer rate at high loads by few nodes; (b) The system exhibits increased latency as load and concurrency (number of active entities) increase; (c) Better performance with respect to the number of requests served and worse with respect to payload.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Throughput obtained using the blocking and non-blocking methods.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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