Management of Mobile Data in a Crop Field
Richard K. Lomotey, Ralph Deters · 2014
The diversity of the mobile landscape is shaping the business outlook of several enterprises including the agricultural sector. Today, there are several opportunities that can be harnessed in terms of productivity, mechanization, revenue, and so on when mobile technology is combined with agriculture technology. Especially, with mobile apps, agriculturists such as crop farmers can have access to timely information that can aid them in making decisions on pesticide information control. The problem however is that, mobile devices communicate over wireless mediums that can be unreliable. This situation causes the back-end to be unreachable from the mobile, and subsequently denial of service when the farmers want to access information at the crop field. This work proposes a reliable distributed mobile architecture that enables crop farmers to access timely information. Firstly, we designed a three layered architecture that comprises a middleware to enable the farmers to access the data when they have access to Wi-Fi or 3.5/4G. Secondly, the mobile node is designed to hoard the data in a NoSQL database to prevent frequent requests being sent to the back-end and to ensure offline accessibility. Finally, when the farmers are offline, they are facilitated to communicate with their friends through Bluetooth in order to synchronize the most up to date information. Preliminary tests show that the proposed system is reliable in terms of the management of the mobile data.