Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

Zoning irrigation smart system based on fuzzy control technology and

IoT for water and energy saving
Hamza Benyezza a, Mounir Bouhedda a, *, Samia Rebouh b
a ^le Urbain, Medea University, Medea, 26000, Algeria
Laboratory of Advanced Electronic Systems (LSEA), University of Medea, Nouveau Po
b
Laboratory of Experimental Biology and Pharmacology (LBPE), University of Medea, Nouveau Po ^le Urbain, Medea University, Medea, 26000, Algeria

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Information and communication technologies play an important role in reforming traditional agriculture
Received 29 February 2020 as well as agricultural development. In this context and to benefit from these technologies, a new irri-
Received in revised form gation strategy is proposed in this paper. A zoning irrigation system based on Internet of Things (IoT) is
28 March 2021
developed and tested, where the main objectives are the optimization of plant growing conditions and
Accepted 2 April 2021
Available online 6 April 2021
the reduction of water use and energy consumption. The proposed system based on a Wireless Sensors
Network (WSN) was installed in different considered zones of a greenhouse. This network sends the data
Handling editor: Dr. Govindan Kannan from the plant environment, such as soil humidity and temperature to a server (Raspberry pi) by means
of radio-frequency (RF) communication. To control the irrigation, a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) processes
Keywords: these data and makes an intelligent and optimal decision. The developed system can monitor and control
Fuzzy control the irrigation in the greenhouse from anywhere and at any time by using a Human Man Interface (HMI)
HMI developed under Node-RED of IBM. The proposed system was applied to irrigate tomato plants in a real
Node-RED server environment. Comparison of the irrigation performance with three other irrigation techniques shows
IoT
that the amount of water and the consumption of energy by adopting the proposed method decreased
WSN
significantly.
Zoning irrigation
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Precision agriculture is expected to solve many agricultural

Water plays an important role in the agricultural development
process because it is an essential element for plant growth.
Therefore, the necessary and sufficient quantity of water should be
provided at the adequate time to improve and increase the agri-
cultural production. In addition, because of the climate change,
authorities are worried about water availability in many countries
where the overall demand for water has considerably and rapidly
increased (de Fraiture and Wichelns, 2010). Traditional irrigation
strategies are not satisfactory to deal with water shortages (Nikzad
et al., 2019; Singh, 2019; Zhang et al., 2019). In fact, the land and
water resources are enough to produce food over the next fifty
years, but only if water is well managed for agriculture (Molden,
2007). To increase water control and thus reduce water use, this
sector must benefit from modern technological advancements and
new solutions must be explored.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: benyezza.hz@gmail.com (H. Benyezza), bouhedda.m@gmail.
com (M. Bouhedda), sarebouh@gmail.com (S. Rebouh).
problems. It can contribute to improve and increase the production
and minimize the use of water (Zhang et al., 2002). The main
purpose of precision agriculture is to increase crop yields and
improve irrigation management while reducing energy and sup-
plies consumption by using new technologies. In precision agri-
culture, related data are gathered using different observation
means like satellites, drones and sensors that are connected to the
decision support tools in form of web and mobile applications.
These data are processed and analyzed to enhance and facilitate the
everyday life of farmers (Khanna and Kaur, 2019). In the last years,
farming has undergone technological transformations, it has been
increasingly industrialized and it became accessible to technology.
By the use of various intelligent farming equipment, farmers have
managed to control the process of cultivation and livestock pro-
duction, making it more predictable and efficient.
Climate change and extreme weather conditions are increasing
the risks to vital infrastructure (Kumar et al., 2021). Reducing water
consumption and energy during the irrigation process is one of the
most important agricultural challenges for many countries. Glob-
ally, more than 70% of water is used for agriculture and since the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127001
0959-6526/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
majority of these countries suffer from a water shortage, they have
to adapt rational management of the water resources and adopt
intelligent irrigation techniques (Doungmanee, 2016; Johansson
et al., 2016; Morison et al., 2008; Velasco-Mun ~ oz et al., 2018).
Over the last 20 years, fuzzy logic (FL) has attracted considerable
attention in agriculture and it has also helped farmers to make the
right choices and decisions for their crops (Papageorgiou et al.,
2016). Application of FL in irrigation systems is more attractive to
most researchers because this kind of controller does not require an
exact estimation or an exact model of the system that often could
be confusing and require significant and impressive assets (Bahat
et al., 2000). In this context, several studies have been proposed
to take advantage of the efficiency of FL technique. Gao et al. have
proposed an intelligent irrigation system based on WSN and fuzzy
control (Gao et al., 2013). The test results compared to the pro-
portionaleintegralederivative (PID) controller show that the FLC is
more suitable for greenhouse irrigation control. Touati et al. have
developed a smart irrigation system, where a FLC is used to control
the irrigation and the tests give good results comparing to the
traditional feedback system (Touati et al., 2013). Li et al. have pro-
posed a real-time irrigation decision support system based on a
fuzzy technique and a dedicated software was developed in this
study for alfalfa irrigation management. The system provided the
irrigation timing and amounts needed for the alfalfa irrigated sys-
tem to operate efficiently. The test in Zhuozhou, in Hebei Province
of China, has shown that this system of support for irrigation de-
cisions is very promising for alfalfa irrigation and harvesting (Li
et al., 2019). FL has been proposed to control irrigation in many
other studies, where the results show that the proposed system is
effective in irrigating agriculture fields by considering the avail-
ability of water, its saving, and soil field moisture conditions
(Carrasquilla-Batista and Chaco n-Rodr; Ibrahim, 2018; Izzuddin
et al., 2018; Kia et al., 2009; Krishnan et al., 2020; Ponnusamy
et al., 2017; Villarrubia et al., 2017). Other researchers have used
FL to control the greenhouse climate according to the different
greenhouse parameters like temperature and humidity (Azaza
et al., 2016; Ben Ali et al., 2016; Benyezza et al, 2018b, 2019;
Revathi and Sivakumaran, 2016). Their results confirm the effec-
tiveness of the FLC in achieving favorable climate conditions, as
well as significant energy saving. FL has been proposed as a solution
in other fields. Marzbanrad et al. have developed a FLC to increase
vehicle stability and ensure the prevention of vehicle rollover
during maneuvers (Marzbanrad et al., 2015). Montazeri-Gh et al.
have proposed a power control algorithm for hybrid electric vehi-
cles based on FLC to minimize fuel consumption and the exhaust
emissions such as CO, HC, and NOx (Montazeri-Gh and Mahmoodi-
K, 2016). Bouhedda et al. succeeded to set up an intersection traffic
light control system based on FL by using a programmable logic
controller (PLC) (Bouhedda et al., 2021).
IoT is one of the most revolutionary technologies in modern
wireless communications. IoT is a set of interconnected objects that
are able to collect and transfer data. The major challenges IoT faces,
are security, the limited calculation and the storage capacity of
sensing devices (Deng et al., 2020; Gupta and Quamara, 2020; Shah
et al., 2021). Gupta and Quamara have presented a survey on the
historical background and architecture of IoT, the main categories of
challenges, and existing solutions (Gupta and Quamara, 2020).
Some of the related IoT infrastructure protocols and open-source
platforms and frameworks were also addressed by the authors.
Cloud computing is commonly adopted as a foundation technology
to operate gathered data (Deng et al., 2020). Al-Qerem et al. have
used cloud computing to process the transaction of data provided
by sensing devices (Al-Qerem et al., 2020). The authors have
introduced IoT transactions using cooperative concurrency control
in the fog-cloud environment. Augmented partial validation
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Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001
protocols have been applied in order to make the IoT transactions,
which have been validated to ensure security in the cloud. Tradi-
tional blacklisting methods for intrusion detection in IoT devices
are no longer effective due to the emergence of novel attacks from
adversaries. To address this problem, a lot of works based on the
different machine and deep learning algorithms for intrusion
detection have been proposed in the literature (Stergiou et al.,
2021; Sunitha Krishnan and Thampi, 2020; Tahsien et al., 2020).
IoT has certainly changed the way of living, working, thinking,
feeling and behaving, and has contributed to solving many prob-
lems in different sectors (Tzounis et al., 2017). Therefore, it has been
applied in agriculture to help the farmers. A greenhouse farm su-
pervision and automatic irrigation system based on IoT has shown
its ability on tracking plant water requirements, alerting the irri-
gation unit, and supplying farm information in real time (Benyezza
et al., 2018a; Nawandar and Satpute, 2019). An intelligent IoT irri-
gation management system has been proposed to minimize water
consumption and the working time needed for irrigation (Difallah
et al., 2018). A combination of intelligent automated irrigation
system based on IoT, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and classification
machine learning algorithm has been proposed to analyze sensors’
information for soil water irrigation (Shekhar et al., 2017). A Cuckoo
search algorithm based on the ThingSpeak cloud has been devel-
oped to allow the allocation of water for farming in any condition,
as well as the selection of appropriate crops for specific land
(Pathak et al., 2019). ThingSpeak has been also used to control the
irrigation and monitor the different water parameters by using a
smartphone or a PC from anywhere and at any time in order to
monitor the orchid greenhouse climate and the growth status of
Phalaenopsis (Jiang et al., 2016). A smart system based on IoT and
image processing has been built, where the authors have expected
that this system will contribute successfully to upgrading Phalae-
nopsis’ farming methods in the future (Liao et al., 2017). Several
studies have been proposed to monitor and control the irrigation
using android applications based on Arduino microcontroller in
which the main objective is saving water (Lorvanleuang et al., 2018;
Permale et al., 2017; Raut et al., 2018; Rawal, 2017; Seenu et al.,
2018).
WSN systems have been widely used in agriculture over the last
decade. This technology has provided an important support for
accurate resource management, irrigation optimization, fertilizer
use, disease monitoring or prevention, and prediction of appro-
priate timing of harvest (Wark et al., 2007). Thus, a lot of research
projects have been realized. A novel algorithm based on Machine
Learning techniques and WSN has been proposed to predict soil
moisture and to make effective irrigation decisions (Goap et al.,
2018). A monitoring and management system of potato crops has
been proposed based on WSN using low-power sensor nodes
(Shinghal Kshitij, 2010). WSN has been used to monitor soil mois-
ture for establishing an autonomous irrigation management system
(Dong et al., 2013). A Smart Watering System (SWS) based on an
android application using a fuzzy approach has been proposed to
take an intelligent decision and a blockchain in order to enhance
the security of all data and communications (Munir et al., 2019). A
low-cost WSN-based decision support system and FL have been
developed to help and support the farmers in irrigation manage-
ment, reducing the waste of irrigated water, and improving the
exploitation of the water resource (Mannini and Genovesi, 2013).
Nikolidakis et al. proposed a new routing protocol to increase the
energy efficiency of WSN using an electronic embedded circuit for
automated irrigation system (Nikolidakis et al., 2015).
This work aims to develop a smart and low-cost irrigation sys-
tem based on zoning in order to minimize the use of water as well
as the consumption of energy. Data on soil and environmental
conditions (temperature and moisture) are collected and
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
transmitted to a base station (server) using a WSN based on RF
communication. Once these data are collected and stored in a
server, the right necessary time for irrigation in each zone is
calculated using a FLC. An HMI based on IoT and Node-RED of IBM is
developed to monitor the collected data from the different
considered zones. The presented system is evaluated by making
comparisons with three other irrigation systems.
The paper is arranged in three main sections, the proposed
system with different hardware and software tools is presented in
Sections II and III respectively. The results of the proposed system
are presented in Section IV. Finally, in Section V the conclusions are
drawn.
2. System setup
The block diagram of the proposed irrigation system is shown in
Fig. 1. It is composed of three main parts: processing, cloud, and
communication part. The agricultural field was divided into mul-
tiple zones (Fig. 2) according to its size and the area that can be
covered by the soil moisture sensor. A node contains a sensor (soil
moisture sensor) and actuator (solenoid valve) which were placed
in each zone. Since the temperature affects the soil by making it
dried when it increases, a temperature sensor was used to measure
the inside temperature of the greenhouse (Feng and Liu, 2015; Sen
and Ozturk, 2017). The measured data are sent to a collector node
(Sink) via RF communication and then transmitted to a processing
unit (Raspberry pi 3). A FLC was developed and hosted on the
server, in order to control the optimal necessary irrigation time for
each zone. The server sends an ON/OFF command to the corre-
sponding valve according to the time calculated by the FLC. The
valve location of each zone is illustrated in Fig. 2. The cloud layer
allows the user to monitor and control the irrigation by using a PC,
smartphone, or any adequate terminal from anywhere and at any
time over the Internet. The system is a mix of drip and furrow
irrigation. The irrigation flow supplied by the pump is conveyed
inside a flexible hose unrolled between the crop rows of each zone
in furrows separated by 10e20 cm depending on the type of soil
(Fig. 2). The sheath has branches that guide the flow of water within
each furrow.
The implementation of the proposed system is done by taking
into account the following constraints:
Fig. 1. General structure of the proposed system.
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Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

The field area: irrigate a small area is not the same as a huge
area.

Sensor range: the area covered by the sensor (in a huge area, a
single sensor is not enough).

The non-linearity of the soil.

Water flow: the water flow rate is affected by pipe length and
the distance to the water source especially in a huge area.

The plant type: the same system can be applied to any type of
plant.
More details about the tools used to set up the proposed system
are given in the sections below.
3. Materials and methods
This section describes the three layers of the proposed system
that have been adopted:
a) Processing layer: contains the FLC.
b) Cloud layer: a server for hosting data and the controller.
c) Communication layer: for transferring data between the
different parts of the system by means of serial, RF communi-
cation and Internet using a WSN architecture.
3.1. Fuzzy controller structure
FL, formalized by Lofti Zadeh in 1965, is an extension of Boolean
logic. It is a generalization of the classical set theory which, by
virtue of its digital dimension, opposes the principles of modal
logic. It has the benefit of introducing the principle of confidence to
check a condition, allowing it to be in a state other than true or
false. FL gives significant flexibility and enables rules to be
expressed in natural language (Hooda and Raich, 2016). Four main
parts can be distinguished constituting the structure of a FLC as
illustrated in Fig. 3 (Ross, 2016).
a) Fuzzification: This part translates quantitative numerical
data from a sensor into qualitative linguistic variables
through a membership function. Various types of functions
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
Fig. 2. Smart zoning irrigation system setup.
can be seen in the literature, the most commonly used are
trapezoidal, triangular and Gaussian.
b) Rule base: We consider inference rules as a collection of
several rules linking the system’s fuzzy inputs variables to its
fuzzy outputs. These rules are represented as “IF-THEN”
rules:
IF condition 1 AND/OR condition 2 (and/or …) THEN action
on the outputs.
c) Inference engine: The inference block is the core of a FLC, it
is capable of simulating human reasoning and inducing FLC
action using fuzzy involvement and inference rules in FL. The
numerical processing of inference rules allows the control-
ler’s linguistic fuzzy output to be obtained, which can be
accomplished using a variety of methods, including: Mam-
dani, Sugeno and Larsen (Mamdani and Assilian, 1975).
d) Defuzzification: This step allows merging the different
commands generated by the inference engine to give only
one output and transform this qualitative linguistic variable
into quantitative numerical data. The most common defuz-
zification methods are: center of gravity (COG) and mean of
maximum (MOM) (Ross, 2016).
Fig. 3. Internal structure of a FLC.
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Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001
Because the soil environment has large inertia, non-linearity,
and strong coupling with different environmental parameters, it
is difficult to set up an exact and precise mathematical model for
the soil and consequently to make a precise decision to control the
irrigation using traditional control methods (Cepeda et al., 2011;
Zhang et al., 1996). FL is a better approach for decision making
problems (Munir et al., 2019) because it has the ability to mimic
human beings in reasoning (Zadeh, 1988), flexibility, and aptitude
to deal with nonlinearities and uncertainties systems (Azaza et al.,
2016; Danish and Onder, 2020; Fedor and Perdukova , 2017; Liu
et al., 2014; Mei et al., 2001). The FLC was adopted as a solution
to deal with the non-linearity of the soil related to the environ-
mental parameters and the irrigation control. The FLC allows to
combine between multiple sources of information in the field and
makes an intelligent decision to control the irrigation. The FLC does
not need any mathematical modeling of the system. It only requires
expertise and a proper configuration of the various components of
the fuzzy structure, where the non-linearity conditions are effi-
ciently handled with the linguistics variables and the set of rules.
The FLC (Fig. 4) calculates the irrigation time (Irr_t) of each zone
according to greenhouse temperature (Temp) and the difference
between the setpoint and the current soil moisture (Err_M). To
implement the FLC, a python code is written according to the
adopted structure of the fuzzy system.
For the membership functions, each input and output has five
Fig. 4. Inputs and output of the adopted FLC.
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

membership functions (two trapezoidal and three triangular), the Table 1

first input (Temp) was described by five fuzzy sets {Very Cold ‘VC’, Some of the fuzzy control rules.

Cold ‘C’, Medium ‘M’, Hot ‘H’, Very Hot ‘VH’}, the second input Rule Temp Err Irr_t
(Err_M) was described also by five fuzzy {Zero ‘Z’, Small ‘S’, Medium 1 M S VSh
‘M’, Big ‘B’, Very Big ‘VB’} and for the output (Irr_t), five linguistic 2 H S Sh
values are considered {Very Short ‘VSh’, Short ‘Sh’, Medium ‘M’, 3 C M M
Long ‘L’, Very Long ‘VL’}. Fig. 5 gives more details about the used 4 VC B M
5 VH VB VL
membership functions and the universe of discourse.
… … … …
Soil moisture is water that is contained in the ground and is
influenced by precipitation, soil temperature, and more. The
interaction between the soil moisture and these factors was taken
b) The number of membership functions for each variable.
into consideration and applied in the fuzzy rules, where 25 rules
c) The adopted rules.
based on Mamdani inference were used to manage the controller.
The relationship between inputs and outputs was described by “IF-
These choices were made optimally based on expert knowledge
THEN” rules extracted from experiences and expert knowledge.
and experimental tests.
Some of these rules are given in Table 1. These rules allow to pro-
vide intelligent decisions to control the irrigation according to soil
and environmental state. 3.2. Node-RED server
The combination of the FLC with the zoning strategy can be
considered as the optimization algorithm for water and energy This server is an open-source server developed by IBM in 2013
saving. The optimization algorithm was integrated into the FLC to connect the Internet to hardware devices, APIs as well as online
through the right choice of three important parameters: services. It is a simple wiring of nodes or predefined code blocks to
perform tasks. Node-RED is based on JavaScript, one of the most
a) The type of membership functions of inputs and output. widely used and easy to learn programming languages. The run-
time is built on Node.js as a flow-based development tool, taking
full advantage of its event-driven and non-blocking model. The
generated flows are saved in JSON, which enables them to be
shared, imported, and exported to the real world (Rogers and
Stanford-Clark, 2018).
Node-RED offers a variety of pre-installed nodes that can be
used. Also, it is possible to create new personalized nodes, speci-
fications, and functionality. These nodes are composed of an HTML
and a JavaScript files. The HTML file indicates how the node should
appear and how many inputs/outputs should be used. The Java-
Script file determines the functionality of the node (Popov, 2016;
Rogers and Stanford-Clark, 2018).
Fig. 6 shows some modules (set of nodes) available in Node-RED,
such as:

Dashboard: provides a set of nodes (text, gauge, chart, etc.) to

quickly create a dashboard for displaying data.

Input/Output: contain nodes which allow to send/receive data
according to a specific communication protocol (serial, mqtt,
http, etc.).

Function: contains a series of nodes supporting processing
functions.

Storage: this module nodes can be used to read/write data from/
into a file or a database (file, MySQL, etc.).

Social: the “social media” nodes support interactions with email,
twitter, Facebook, etc.

One of the greatest advantages of Node-RED is its ability to

operate at the edge of the network on low-cost hardware such as
Raspberry Pi, in the cloud (IBM, Amazon, Oracle, Google, etc.) and
locally on a standard PC (Windows, Linux, Raspbian and Mac OS)
(Rogers and Stanford-Clark, 2018).
The Node-RED server is an important part that is related to IoT
and the host of the controller, where it performs processing com-
mands and displays data. The main benefit of using the server is
that the controller implementation is not restricted to the micro-
controller memory. The consumption of energy in the WSN nodes
can be minimized by using an adequate control algorithm for the
used actuators.
Fig. 7 shows the general structure of the developed Node-RED
Fig. 5. Membership function of FLC. server, where four main blocks are considered:
5
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
Fig. 6. Some of Node-RED nodes.
Fig. 7. Node-RED general structure.
a) Receiving data block: It is the part responsible for reading the
data provided by the sink node and the guideline instructions
(plant type) established by the user through the HMI. The in-
ternal architecture of this block is illustrated in Fig. 8, where it
contains:

“serial in” node: to read data sent by the Sink from a local
serial port (COM12 in our case).

“button” node: to select the plant type.

“functions” node: to store the data, provided by the sink, and
the plant conditions (reference values).
All of these received data are concatenated in a single vector in a
global variable to allow their transition to the processing block.
b) Data processing block: This block (Fig. 9) allows the analysis
and processing of the data transmitted through the sink node
with taking into account the plant conditions. The “pythonshell
in” node is used to run the python script of the FLC where the
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Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001
node’s inputs are the argument for the python script and the
script’s final result is sent to the node’s output.
One instance of data can easily be sent directly to the output
through the command “print”, but it becomes more complicated
when there are two or more variables. In this case, the position of
each variable must be specified. Another problem is string con-
version, an everlasting computer science problem. To avoid all
these problems, the data are formatted using “json” format, which
is a collection of name/value pairs separated by a comma. This
format is supported by all modern languages (C, Cþþ, JavaScript,
Python, etc.) (Lindsay Bassett, 2015).
The output of “pythonshell in” provides a frame of data which
consists of several variables (temperature, soil_m zone1, irriga-
tion_time zone1, etc.) of type “string”, These variables must be
separated for individual display and command transmission to the
Sink. For this purpose, the node “json” is used. This latter allows
converting between “json” string and object type. The “json”
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

Fig. 8. Internal architecture of receiving data block.

Fig. 9. Node-RED flow for data processing blocks.

function must be followed by several functions to get values indicate valve state ON/OFF) and text (for displaying irriga-
separately like: Soil_m Zone1, Soil_m Zone1, Temperature, etc. tion time).
d) Sending commands block: The “serial out” node (Fig. 11)
c) Displaying data block: This block (Fig. 10) is used to display transmits FLC decision commands from the server to the
the data outputs, which are the irrigation time and the state sink.
of the actuators. It enables the use of different dashboard
nodes, such as gauge or chart, to monitor the irrigation sys-
tem from anywhere and at any time (for the soil moisture of
the different zones and the greenhouse temperature), led (to 3.3. Communication

As described earlier, two kinds of communication are used in

addition to the Internet: serial communication and RF communi-
cation. RF signals are easily generated and ranged from 3 kHz to

Fig. 10. Some Node-RED flows for displaying data. Fig. 11. Serial out node.

7
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
300 GHz. Due to their property to penetrate items and travel
lengthy distances, they are used in wireless communication
(Dowla, 2004). The main advantages of using wireless communi-
cation are the ease of deployment, self-organization, and reduced
wiring, which significantly reduces the cost of installation and
maintenance in large areas.
The communication between the collector node and the
different zones is established using RF communication. Each node
starts a communication with the sink node on a certain frequency,
called channel, by sending a data packet containing the current soil
moisture. After the entire packet has been transmitted, the receiver
sends an acknowledge packet to the transmitter containing the
irrigation command sent by the server based on the FLC.
3.4. Components of the wireless node
Fig. 12 depicts the node installed in each zone, which is made up
of five major components, namely:
a) Nano Arduino: It is the node’s heart; its role is to store and
execute a program for data acquisition from sensors, com-
mand transmission to actuators, and data transmission or
data reception from the server (Fig. 12a).
b) nRF24L01 þ module: It is the element used for RF
communication to send and receive data (Fig. 12b). It is a
Nordic Semiconductor chip RF Transceiver Integrated Circuit
(IC). It operates in the license-free 2.4 GHz ISM band
(ISMeIndustrial, Scientific and Medical) with 250 kbps, 1
Mbps and 2 Mbps data rate support. It is connectable with
SPI and has a wide range of very interesting features such as
low power modes, multiple channels, switching and cali-
bration of frequency (Michael, 2017). This module is used not
only because of its low cost, but also because it is relatively
easy to use for short or long-range communications.
c) Soil moisture sensor YL-69 (hygrometer): It is used to
measure the humidity of the soil (Fig. 12c).
d) Battery: It is used to provide energy to the node (Fig. 12d).
e) Valve: It is used to control the water circulation (Fig. 12e).
Fig. 12. Components of the wireless node.
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Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001
To measure the temperature, the DHT22 sensor is used (Fig. 13c).
It is a low-cost digital temperature and humidity sensor. A capac-
itive moisture sensor and a thermistor are used to measure
respectively moisture and temperature of the air around the pin,
and a digital signal, containing the measured values, is transmitted
to the data pin.
4. Tests, results and discussion
The proposed system was implemented and tested in a real field
of six square meters to irrigate tomato crops during eight days;
from 28 July to 04 August 2019. The considered area was divided
into two zones. Each one included a wireless node with a solenoid
valve and a soil moisture sensor (Fig. 13 a, Fig. 13b). A third sensor
node was also installed to measure the ambient temperature
(Fig. 13c). Raspberry Pi was used and served as a server and HMI
host (Fig. 13d).
Batteries were used to power the wireless nodes. These nodes
are mainly composed of a microcontroller and an ultra-low power
consumption transmission module, the nRF24L01þ. Data process-
ing is done on the server, which is advantageous for saving energy
in the nodes and keeping power consumption low where the role of
nodes is reduced practically to just sending and receiving data. By
adopting this way, the battery life can be extended from several
weeks to months.
An approximative study according to the node consumption and
the communication protocol has shown that the node batterie has
to be replaced every eight months if an AA NiMH (Nickel Metal
Hydride) cell with 2400 mAh is used. The batteries can be replaced
and recharged manually. If the proposed irrigation method is
applied outside a greenhouse (open field) and in sunny areas, a
better solution would be to replace the battery with solar power
modules.
The considered variables in the greenhouse have slow dy-
namics. For this reason and to save energy consumption, the
duration of each cycle, was fixed to one second, which is more than
enough time to read data from all the nodes by the sink. Table 2
illustrates the complexity analysis of the proposed approach
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

Fig. 13. Hardware implementation.

Table 2 (Fig. 14) during one week is shown in Fig. 15. These findings, as
Complexity analysis of the proposed method. expected, show that the FLC controlled effectively the soil moisture,
Processor RAM Execution time Average CPU usage which had been successfully stabilized between 400% and 500%,
which corresponds to the ideal condition for the considered plant
1.2 GHz 64-bit quad core 1 G0 1015(s) 60%
ARM Cortex-A53 (Mattoo, 2017).
Fig. 16 shows the used components for the HMI dashboard
corresponding to the blocks shown in Fig. 10. The user can monitor
which depends on the used hardware platform (Raspberry pi), the the different parameters of each zone like temperature (Temp) and
efficiency of the compiler, the operating system, the programming its variation using a graph, soil moisture (Soil_MZ1 and Soil_MZ2),
skills, the size of the inputs and more: valve state (valve 1 and valve 2), and irrigation time (irri_time_Z1
and irri_time_Z2) from a local HMI or by using the cloud over the

The execution time: It is the time it takes the Raspberry Pi to run Internet.
the FLC script to determine the irrigation time for two regions, For another plant, exactly the same system can be used. Just the
which is equivalent to 1015 s (real time decision). soil moisture reference should be set according to the corre-

Average CPU usage: The whole system (FLC and Node-RED sponding plant through the HMI (Fig. 17). The user needs just to
server) occupies 60% of Raspberry’s CPU. It was calculated us- select the considered plant (pepper, cucumber, eggplant, etc.), and
ing the “cpu node” which allows monitoring the CPU usage in the system reacts according to the selected plant reference set
Node-RED. which, according to expert knowledge, is already incorporated into
the system.
The evaluation of soil moisture corresponding to the two zones By default, the Node-RED editor is not secured, anyone who can
with the FLC under different temperatures of the environment access its IP address can access the editor and deploy changes. For
this reason, it must be secured in order to safeguard the system and
prevent outsiders from accessing it. Three preventive measures
were adopted to ensure security:

‣ Enabling HTTPS access: To enable access to the Node-RED Editor

over HTTPS, rather than the default HTTP, the https configura-
tion option in the settings file was used.
‣ Securing the editor and admin API: The editor and admin API
were secured using user name and password.
‣ Securing the HTTP Nodes and Node-RED Dashboard: The
“httpNodeAuth” property in the “settings.js” file was used to
specify a username and password for accessing the routes.

To validate the proposed system, a comparison with three other

irrigation methods was conducted:

‣ Method 1: A similar system was proposed (two zones were

considered). However, a bang-bang controller implemented on
the server is used. The controller receives the soil moisture from
each zone, and if it reaches the threshold value, the corre-
sponding valve is activated through the server by sending an ON
command.
‣ Method 2: In the system proposed in (Gao et al., 2013), a local
sensor node is installed in the field (only one zone is considered)
to send the soil moisture values to a sink node that is connected
to a Raspberry via the serial port. To calculate the irrigation time,
Fig. 14. Ambient temperature variation during one week.

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H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

Fig. 15. Soil moisture variation in each zone during one week using the FLC.

Fig. 16. HMI dashboard.

Fig. 17. “Plant type” view in the HMI.

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H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

a FLC with two inputs corresponding to the value of soil mois-

ture and the rate of change of deviation, is used.
‣ Method 3: Another system is given by (Harish Kumar, 2017),
where a node containing soil moisture and temperature sensors
is installed in the field. The data from the nodes is transmitted to
a Raspberry server via RF communication module. The server
compares the soil moisture value to a threshold and sends an
ON/OFF command to the valve.

The four methods were implemented and tested to irrigate the

same plant (tomato) at the same conditions during eight days. The
amount of water consumed and the working time of the actuators
in each method are shown in Table 3. The test results show that the
proposed method consumed the least amount of water (an average
of 5,75 L per day). Furthermore, the shorter operating duration of
the actuators has been noticed, implying lower energy
consumption.
The amount of water and energy consumed in each method was
estimated over a four-month period, which is the time required for
crop maturation, taking into account the additional needs as the
plants grow. The comparison results are represented in Fig. 18. They
show the advantages of using the proposed method, where the
amount of water and the energy consumption are reduced
considerably, more than 188 L and 39 Wh, respectively, when
compared to the second-best method, which corresponds to
method 2. These findings show the advantage of using zoning
irrigation combined with fuzzy control. Even when huge agricul-
tural areas are considered, the consumption of water and energy is
significantly reduced.
Table 4 represents the relative difference of water and energy
cost between the three methods and the proposed solution during
the plant maturation period that the farmer has to pay according to
the real price given by the Algerian authorities (ADE, 2020; SADEG,
2020). According to these results, the farmer can save 46.81%,
26.41% and 65.22% of production cost compared to methods 1, 2
and 3 respectively.
It is true that the difference is not considerable according to the
results given by Fig. 18 and Table 3 because the considered area is
small. However, in the case of a large greenhouse or huge area, and
by considering multiple zones, a significant difference and addi-
tional benefits can be noticed.
Table 5 shows the cost of the proposed system components. The
system requires no installation costs because the wireless nodes are
simple to set up and the procedure can be accomplished by the
user. As can be deduced, the system is inexpensive. The total cost of
the system for a 200 m2 area with one node every 10 m2 (twenty
zones) is around 276.49 US $. The system’s low cost and efficiency
make it an affordable solution for the majority of farmers who
cannot tolerate to implement other strategies. Instinctively, a large
region needs to be divided into many areas in which each area
needs a node. This requires the installation of more nodes on the
field and thus the cost increases. This can be checked by the values
given by Fig. 19, which shows that the hardware cost of the pro-
posed method is twice as much as Method 2 and Method 3. This
additional cost could be considered an investment that can be
amortized in several crop production by reducing water and power
costs.
Fig. 18. Water amount and energy consumed estimation.
According to (Bonanomi et al., 2011; Clemmens and Dedrick,
1994; Munir et al., 2018; Yavuz et al., 2012) and our tests’ results,
Table 6 shows a comparison between the proposed method and the
traditional irrigation strategies. The proposed system offers many
advantages that can help the user in terms of water and energy
saving, intelligent control, installation and labor costs, remote
monitoring and control.
Table 7 provides a general comparison between the proposed
solution and some new previous proposed strategies. In this work,
a new low-cost strategy of irrigation is proposed. The novelties,
which are related to the experimental setup and adopted strategies
for control and supervision, are given namely:

Using zoning irrigation: The previous proposed works did not
take into consideration the field area, sensor range, water flow,
and plant size, and the decision is based on a single source of
information (single sensor). Water flow rate is affected by pipe
length and the distance to the water source, especially in a huge
area. The zoning irrigation strategy gives a complete image of
the soil (multi sensors) and it ensures that each plant receives
the exact amount of water that it needs.

Real time monitoring: By implementing a low cost and ultra-
low-power WSN and developing an HMI based on a new free
IoT platform (Node-RED).

Server implementation: Since the microcontrollers have limited
memories sizes for processing, the proposed system uses the
Node-Red server as a processing unit and an HMI at the same
time to enhance node autonomy.

Implementation of an intelligent controller: The proposed FLC
takes into account the relation between the soil and the envi-
ronment (nonlinear relationship of the soil with the environ-
mental parameters) and allows to produce smart decisions to
control the irrigation in each zone.

Table 3
Although we are convinced that the proposed system is efficient
Water use and operating duration of actuators for eight days.
and provides an improvement on water and energy saving
Methods Consumed water (L) Duration of actuators’ functioning compared to the other existing irrigation strategies, it is very
1st method 64 01h31mn00s difficult to give an exact percentage improvement in this manu-
2nd method 57 01h18mn45s script because it needs a comparison on several scales and each
3rd method 72 01h40mn15s scheme has its advantages and limitations, however:
Proposed method 46 01h03mn52s

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H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

Table 4
Relative difference of water and energy cost of the three methods compared to the proposed solution during four months.

Methods Relative difference of water cost Relative difference of energy cost Total

1st method þ39.13% þ7.68% þ46.81%

2nd method þ23.91% þ2.50% þ26.41%
3rd method þ56.52% þ8.70% þ65.22%

Table 5
System components cost.

Raspberry pi 3 Arduino nano nRF24L01 þ module Soil moisture sensor Temperature sensor Valve Node-RED server Total cost in 200 m2

Price (US $) 45,30 2,71 2,99 1,61 4,29 3,50 Open source 276.49

terms of water and energy saving in an area of six square meters

over a period of four months compared to (Gao et al., 2013) and
(Harish Kumar, 2017) respectively.
b) According to Table 5, the proposed system gives more than 80%
of improvement (water and energy saving, wireless communi-
cation, low cost, and remote monitoring and control) compared
to the most widely used irrigation strategies (drip, flood,
sprinkler, and furrow).
c) There is a significant improvement in comparison to modern
irrigation strategies, particularly in large areas. The benefits of
the proposed system are not immediately apparent (especially
the financial aspect, as the user must invest in system installa-
tion), but with time, the difference and improvement can be
perceived.

5. Conclusion

Irrigation management and water saving are the most signifi-

Fig. 19. Estimated installation cost.
a) According to tests results and comparison to the works of (Liao
et al., 2017) and (Harish Kumar, 2017), we can say that the
proposed system gives an improvement of 26.41% and 65.22% in
cant challenges in agriculture. In this paper, a new strategy of
irrigation based on zoning irrigation, fuzzy control, WSN commu-
nication, and IoT was proposed for monitoring the irrigation and
maintaining soil moisture at ideal conditions for plant growth
while consuming the minimum amount of water and energy.
As expected, the proposed strategy was implemented with
success where the objectives were achieved. When the FLC was
combined with a zoning strategy, the obtained results showed
superiority in terms of minimizing water and energy consumption
when compared to other methods. Many advantages come with the
developed system, including:

Table 6
Comparative between the proposed solution with the traditional irrigation strategies.

comparison Proposed method Drip irrigation Furrow irrigation Sprinkler irrigation Flood irrigation
criteria

Water & Energy Very high (especially in huge area) High, compared to furrow and flood Low Low to medium Very low
saving
Irrigation Control Intelligent control (very precise) Manually Not possible Manually Not possible
Installation Cost Lowest operational and labor (based on Low initial and operational as Lowest initial High initial and Lowest initial
wireless communication) compares to sprinkler High operational operational High operational
and labor and labor
Monitoring Based on WSN and IoT Based on labor locally Based on labor Based on labor Based on labor
locally locally locally
Maintenance Low cost (due to using WSN and IoT) Need regular maintenance High operational Need regular /
and labor maintenance
Labor Cost Very low (replaced by WSN and IoT) Moderate High Moderate High
Disease and pest can be monitored through the HMI by adding Relatively less High Medium Very high
problems sensors
Efficiency of High High Minimum Moderate Minimum
fertilize use

12
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh Journal of Cleaner Production 302 (2021) 127001

Table 7
Comparative between the proposed solution with some new previous proposed strategies.

Methods Included sensors controller Connectivity User interfaces Methodology

Krishnan Temperature, humidity, soil FL implemented in Arduino GSM/GPRS -Local LCD display - High water & energy saving
et al. moisture, water level, rain & -Notification through mobile compared to drip & manual flood
(2020) LDR phone irrigation
- Remote monitoring
- Low manual labor cost
- Solar power
Villarrubia Humidity, soil moisture, FL Wi-Fi, GPRS, Android application (TV - Low-cost system
et al. temperature, light, water Implemented in mc ATmega328p with ethernet & platform, mobile phone) - Water saving
(2017) level & oxygen PANGEA multi-agent systems RF - WSN based
- Remote monitoring
- Storage database
Touati Soil moisture, temperature, FL implemented in mc Xbee, GSM/ PC (LabView) - Solar power
et al. solar radiation & water flow Atmega32 GPRS - High water saves
(2013) - Remote monitoring
- Low-cost, efficient & easy to
implement
Shekhar Temperature & soil moisture machine learning algorithm K-NN SPI & Webpage - Remote monitoring
et al. deployed in Raspberry ethernet - Soil quality predicting
(2017)
Goap et al. Soil temperature, soil support vector regression model and k- Xbee, SPI Webpage - Predict the irrigation requirements
(2018) moisture, air temperature & means clustering algorithm implemented & Wi-Fi with high accuracy
humidity in the server - Centralized database
- WSN based
- Remote monitoring
- Web service for online weather
data collection
- Cost effective
- Water saving
Munir Light, soil moisture, camera, Decision support system based on FL Wi-Fi & Android phone application - Remote monitoring
et al. temperature & humidity implemented in the server Bluetooth - Secure communication
(2019) - Optimize energy consumption
- Decentralized database
Proposed Temperature & soil moisture FL implemented in the server RF, SPI Node-RED - High water & energy saving
Method & Wi-Fi Server (access through the web compared to (Gao et al., 2013) &
without need to install any (Harish Kumar, 2017)
applications) - Zoning based irrigation
- High precision (zoning þ FLC)
- Remote access (through Node-RED
server)
- Server implementation (not limited
to mc memory)
- WSAN based
- Cloud storage
- Low-cost system
- Modular
- Easy installation

Intelligent control using FL.

Real time monitoring using IoT and WSN.

Money saving by minimizing the consumption of water and
energy.

Farmer efforts Reducing.

Easy installation with the ability to add and adopt a modular
node if more zones are required.

More sensors or actuators can be easily added to the adopted
system’s architecture through easy adaptation of the nodes.

Using of low-cost hardware especially in terms of IoT and
communication.

Valid for many types of plants.
As perspectives to this work, it is planned to improve and bring
more affinity by securing data transfer between the fields and the
server using new cryptography techniques. It is also interesting to
create a database system from the collected data that can be used
for analysis, prediction and more.
Furthermore, the solution adopted can be adapted for other
applications like:
13

Healthcare: WSNs can be implanted in humans and send real-
time data to a server, where it can be processed and analyzed.
The newly developed HMI allows doctors to keep track of their
patients’ health outside of the hospital and improve risk man-
agement. The proposed system can also be used in health care to
connect medical equipment to the cloud, allowing for better
monitoring and maintenance.

Traffic management: The proposed system can be used to
monitor intersections (via WSN and IoT) and intelligently con-
trol traffic lights (via the FLC).

Industry 4.0: The Node-RED server can be used to develop HMIs
that enable users, from any location and at any time, to monitor
and control their processes and improve security and optimize
processes and workflows.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Hamza Benyezza: Methodology, Software, Validation, Investi-
gation, Writing e original draft, Writing e review & editing.
Mounir Bouhedda: Conceptualization, Validation, Resources,
H. Benyezza, M. Bouhedda and S. Rebouh
Writing e original draft, Writing e review & editing, Supervision,
Project administration. Samia Rebouh: Validation, Writing e
original draft, Writing e review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
This work is supported by the Directorate General for Scientific
Research and Technological Development (DGRSDT) of the Algerian
Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MESRS).
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