A High Availability Networked Control System Architecture for Precision Agriculture
Hassan M. Ibrahim, Norhan Mostafa, Hassan H. Halawa, Malak Y. ElSalamouny, Ramèz M. Daoud, Hassanein Hamed Amer, Amr M. Shaarawi, Ahmed Mahmoud Taha Khattab, Hany M. ElSayed · 2018
Precision agriculture systems are usually studied in the context of Wireless Sensor Networks. In this paper, a hierarchical Networked Control System (NCS) is proposed for two Greenhouses. This system is built on top of switched Ethernet and Wi-Fi, and is IoT-based. Fire and CO2 sensors imposed a 1s real-time deadline. It is shown how to allocate Wi-Fi channels to prevent interference in this relatively large NCS. Riverbed simulations proved that the two-Greenhouse NCS did not suffer any packet loss and was able to meet real-time constraints. Fault Tolerance at the controller level is then added to the system. Riverbed simulations again proved that the system can operate as a 1-out-of-2 system; if one controller fails, the other controller can operate both greenhouses. A case study is then presented to show that fault tolerance can decrease downtime which is a very important advantage especially in developing countries.