Monitoring Plant Growth in a Greenhouse Using IoT with the Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A greenhouse is an artificial structure enclosed inside which plants requiring regulated climatic conditions are grown. This environment helps in protecting the crops from the outside weather, pests, and disease. Consequently, the risk of pests and insects attacking crops would be minimized to a greater extent, and automating a greenhouse would make monitoring and controlling of the climatic parameters, which directly or indirectly govern the plant growth and hence their produce without human intervention. In order to observe and control the microclimatic variables of a greenhouse, a wireless sensor network has been implemented for data collection like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, etc. Each sensor node can transmit monitoring data to the cloud. The actuators are used to increase/decrease the growth parameters whenever the system senses any abnormalities. Continuous basis round clock for farming of crops was used to maximize their production over the whole crop growth season and eliminate the difficulties involved in the system by reducing human intervention to the best possible extent. Users can monitor the growth parameters of plants in real-time through a user-responsive webpage which is established via a local server on ESP32, with the set threshold values, and manually control temperature and irrigation via fan and solenoid valve respectively.