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Smart Irrigation system using Internet of Things

Conference Paper · February 2020

DOI: 10.1109/ic-ETITE47903.2020.271

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 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)
Smart Irrigation system using Internet of Things
A. Anitha Nithya Sampath
School of Information Technology School of Information Technology
and Engineering and Engineering
2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE) 978-1-7281-4142-8/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 10.1109/ic-ETITE47903.2020.271
Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology,
Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.
aanitha@vit.ac.in
Abstract— Central Intelligent Agency (CIA) fact book
ranked India a number 2 out of 238 countries. India takes of
17% of world’s population, but with 4% of fresh water
resource. Out of which 80% of water is used for agriculture.
Country like India, has very good natural resources, but not
used in a congruous way. This lead to make water as an
adequate resource. So it is time for us to utilized the available
water in an efficient way and to amend the victuals
productivity of the nation to compete with the world’s growth.
The most critical thing is to manage the water system with the
available amount of water. In most of the agriculture lands the
crops are over watered with out checking the soil dampness.
This leads to the waste of water resource which can be utilized
in some other areas where there is in need of water. Issue
related water system are constantly obstructing the
improvement of the nation. So to enhance the water
management system, some of the smart techniques are evolved.
The paper is to present an internet of things (IOT) based smart
irrigation system to identify the dampness in the soil and to
control the watering of the crops automatically. The primary
motivation behind the ventures to keep up soil dampness level
so that there is no damage to the harvests. Soil dampness
sensors fundamentally utilized for estimating the gauge
volumetric water content. Microcontroller are utilized for
getting the information from the water system sensors and
after that pass the information on the web utilizing GPRS
module. The most intriguing highlights of this activities are
shrewd water system with brilliant control and around right
choice dependent on the continuous field information. The
controlling procedure of these tasks should be possible utilizing
the remote sensors or framework associated with the Internet
and every one of the activities should be possible by combining
every one of the sensors, for example, WI-FI or THINGS
SPEAK modules. Since much of the general population are not
known with the smart techniques, the primary focus is to make
common layman to know and to use these techniques to
improve the productivity with adequate resources.
Keywords— Internet of Things (IOT), smart irrigation, soil
moisture sensor, Water level sensor, Temperature, humidity
I. Introduction
Indian economy mainly focus of agriculture. A country
with consistent agriculture magnification can have the
sustainability in world economy. Country like India, has very
good climatic condition to grow sundry agriculture crops.
But at the same time land and water are the more crucial
resources in India. Among these two, inadequacy in water
resources causes sizably voluminous impact on the yield of
agricultural crops. So, water scarcity has an astronomically
immense impact on victuals engenderment. Absence of water
makes the farmers to struggle to produce crops and this
makes a downfall to feed every human in the growing
population. According to International Water Management
Institute(IWMI) states that the 70% of accumulated water
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE
978-1-7281-4142-8/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: Auckland University of Technology. Downloaded on May 24,2020 at 07:26:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
M.Asha Jerlin
School of Information Technology
and Engineering
Vellore Institute of Technology
Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.
usage from the ground level, is used for the domestic use,
industrial and environmental uses that increases the water
scarcity problem. If such amount of water is used for other
usage , then the main use of water for agriculture has been
shirked, causes the population to think about the optimal way
of water management.
One such method of water management is irrigation
system. Irrigation is a method of conveying water to food
crops or cash crops to maximize the amount of crops yield.
The usage of irrigation systems have not done in a optimized
way do reduce the utilization of water in an efficient way.
This causes more water then obligatory to be used or for
there not to be enough water to ascertain salubrious crops. As
stated by the World Bank that irrigation management system
dwells to promote and sustain irrigation systems of the
groundwater level, that are previously placed and improves
the areas of irrigation to increase the quantity of crops
yielded.
As it is proven that efficient utilization of water through
irrigation system has improved the growth of agriculture. But
water spraying timing is depend on decisions such as time to
irrigate and what level to be irrigated. In the modern era,
watering the plants by traditional methods are replaced by
the automated devices. Some of the benefits of automated
irrigations system includes lowering the water electricity bill,
prevents uneven watering and the plant gets required amount
of water by avoiding wastage of water. On considering the
water scarcity and wasting the water by providing to the
agriculture land which is already with enough humidity is not
the proper way of farming. So before automated irrigation,
one should decide that the agriculture land of that location is
in need of water and how much water to be irrigated for the
field. To make an automation system, we are need of soil and
plants water condition, plant growth and phonological stages,
availability of water, quality of water, weather conditions,
and the operational eminence of the irrigation system.
Various research have been done and the most of automated
system are implemented commercially. But instead of
automation we have integrate with smart irrigation system in
which the wide scope to automate the complete irrigation
system on time.
In this paper, we are building a IOT building irrigation
system using ESP8266 Node multipoint control unit (MCU)
module and digital temperature and humidity sensor
(DTH11) sensor. Also thing speak server is used to track the
land condition to receive the moisture level in the soil.
Sprinkler system is also an irrigation bases system, where the
water flows through the tubes and water the plants according
to their needs. The necessary water based on the land
environmental conditions such as Moisture, temperature and
humidity can be identified by the smart system and the
power will be switched on to provide enough water to the
1
 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)
plants. The automated systems which are already
implemented has the limitations like sending the alert
message or the SMS to the mobile but the data was not
stored permanently for further use. The aim of the paper is to
provide smart irrigation system with automated devices and
the store the data in the IOT cloud. Also Rain alarm and soil
moisture detector circuit are also used to build the smart
irrigation system.
The paper has been planned as follows: Section 1 confer
about the need of irrigation system and the enhancement to
IOT cloud based smart irrigation system, whereas Section 2
discuss about the literature review. Section 3 explains the
materials and the research methodology proposed followed
by Section 4, which provides the experimental analysis. The
paper concludes with Section 5.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
A remote quantification and control system for green
house predicated on Global System for Mobile GSM-SMS
was proposed by Jinling et.al which sends the status of the
temperature and sultriness of the green house through SMS
and by remote machines, the contrivances are controlled to
water the plants utilizing sensors and automated contrivances
[1]. Gautam and Reddy proposed an innovative GSM
Bluetooth predicated remote controlled embedded system for
irrigation [2]. Suresh et.al have proposed an architecture
predicated on the capabilities of current and next-generation
microcontrollers and their application requisites[3].
Microcontroller utilized for the system is promising that it
can increment system life by decreasing the puissance
utilization resulting from lower power consumption.
Kansara et.al has proposed astute irrigation system utilizing
IOT [4]. They proposed the technology of irrigation where
the human intervention can be minimized. if there is a
change in temperature and sultriness of the circumventions
the sensors reads the vicissitude in temperature and sultriness
and gives signal to interrupt the micro-controller to make the
contrivance on or off. Archana and Priya proposed a
microcontroller predicated system that supervises the water
level and the aread to be irrigated [5]. Sensors are present to
check the presence of water in the field. Once the field
desiccates sensors sense the requisite till the sensors is
deactivated again. Anitha have proposed and garbage
monitoring system using IOT using sensor on lid of the
garbage bin that detects the level of garbage based on the
height of the bin [6].
Uddin et.al proposed a model of variable rate automatic
microcontroller predicated irrigation system [7]. Solar power
is utilized as only the source of potency to control the overall
system. Sensors are placed on the paddy field and these
sensors perpetually sense the waterlevel and give the
message to the farmer apprising the waterlevel. Without
visiting the paddy fields, farmers can get the information
about the waterlevel. Predicated on the waterlevel, a farmer
can control the motor by sending a message from his cellular
phone even from a remote place. However, if the waterlevel
reaches to the hazard level; the motor will automatically start
without attestation of farmer to ascertain the opportune
waterlevel in the site. Chavan and Karande had proposed to
develop a perspicacious wireless sensor network (WSN) for
an agricultural environment. Monitoring agricultural
environment for sundry factors such as soil moisture,
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temperature and sultriness along with other factors can be of
paramount[8]. A traditional approach to quantify these
factors in an agricultural environment betokened individuals
manually taking quantifications and checking them at sundry
times. This paper investigates a remote monitoring system
utilizing Zigbee. These nodes send data wirelessly to a
central server, which amasses the data, stores it and will
sanction it to be analyzed then exhibited as needed and can
additionally be sent to the client mobile. Anitha have
proposed home security system using IOT [9]. The system
will inform the owner about any unauthorized entry or
whenever the door is opened by sending a notification to the
user. After the user gets the notification, he can take the
necessary actions. The security system will use a
microcontroller known as Arduino Uno to interface between
the components, a magnetic Reed sensor to monitor the
status, a buzzer for sounding the alarm, and a WiFi module,
ESP8266 to connect and communicate using the Internet.
The main advantages of such a system includes the ease of
setting up, lower costs and low maintenance. Parameswaran
et.al has discussed on an irrigation system based on soil
dampness[10]. Sultriness sensor is utilized to discover the
soil dampness and predicated on the solenoid valve. Along
with the climatic conditions the crops should be water by
knowing the pH level of the water and the soil to yield the
better crops. Monitor is utilized to show the pH level,
moisture level and temperature.This will ameliorate the
farming system for better productivity.
III. MATERIALS AND METHODOLOGY
A smart irrigation system is configured with various
eessential components as listed as follows.
• ARDUINO Uno
• DHTll Temperature and Humidity Sensor
• Connecter wire
• Bread Board, Laptop
• Water level Sensor
• Soil Moisture Sensor.
Some of the software requirements are ThingSpeak
application, Arduino application, C Programming for
Arduino
1. Arduino Uno
Arduino Uno is a PC equipment, that is open source
which organizes the components by the programming
language and integrates the enterprise with the client group
to produce microcontroller packs. These micro-controlled
packs are used as an intelligent agent which was
programmed to detect and to control working of the system
in the real-life Sample Arduino Uno is shown in Fig. 1.
Generally, Arduino boards are inexpensive and used in
various operating systems. It is easy and flexible for the
beginners. It is compatible with various languages such as
C++ and JAVA .
 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)

Fig.1 Arduino Board

2. DTH11 Sensor:
DTH-11 sensor is a very popular sensor for measuring
the humidity and temperature with +0.5 degree accuracy.
DTH-11 sensor consists of a moisture sensing sensor, a
temperature sensor and an IC on the back side of the sensor. Fig.3 Soil Moisture Sensor
It comes with 4 pins and 3 pins. In Figure 2, how to connect 4. Wifi Module
using DTH-11 sensor has been explained.
ESP-8266 is a cheap Wi-Fi module. It has dual
functionality, it can carry and drive the entire application and
can control other micro-controller units. It's working power
range is 3.0 to 3.6 volts. It has a built-in TCP/IP stack.

Fig.2 : DTH-11 Sensor

3. Soil moisture sensor
The Fig.3 shows a sort of soil moisture sensor. It
contains two tests by methods for which current will go into
the dirt, at that point scrutinizes the obstruction of the soil,
which will peruse the dampness level. We know the nearness
of the water makes the dirt more inclined to lead the power
effortlessly, which implies R(resistance) is less in the such
kind of soil, while dry soil has poor conductivity of intensity,
in this way dry soil upholds more insurance than the wet soil.
Sensor is structured on this property of intensity. There
should be a point that believers the obstruction into voltage,
this is done using circuit which show inside the sensor,
which changes over the opposition into voltage.
Fig 4. Wifi Module
5. Water Level Sensor
Water Level Sensor is a clean-to-utilize, charge effective
unreasonable degree/drop fame sensor that is procured by
method for having a succession of parallel wires uncovered
follows estimated beads/water amount so it will choose the
water degree. Smooth to finish water to simple sign change
and yield simple esteems can be quickly perused Arduino
advancement board to pick up the level alert impact.

Fig 6. Water Level Sensor

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 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)

products. The IOT basically based arranged framework given

amid this examination are valuable to achieve such an
Specifications of the Water level sensor is given as undertaking. The prototype framework examination of this
follows: study enables monitoring any agricultural arrive and keeps
voltage: DC3 5V up moisture of the dirt. This thought will unquestionably
encourage any country move to sensible Agriculture. The
current: less than 21mA framework is foreseen to figure and create records in period.
Type: Analog The real execution of the framework would require changes
in detecting component, innovations and supply code in spite
Detect Area: 4ommx16mm of the fact that the approach and control remain steady. The
Humidity: 11% -90% non-condensing proposed system was demonstrated with the help of
Thingspeak cloud. ThingSpeak is an IOT analytics place to
Product Dimensions: 62mmx2ommx8mm accommodate to sanctions to aggregate, depict and analyze
6. Bread Board and jumper wires real-time data streams in the cloud. ThingSpeak gives instant
envision of data posted by the contrivances with the
competency to execute MATLAB code. Additionally , it is
often utilized for prototyping and proof of concept IOT
systems that require analytics.

A. Proposed system
The data is first collected from the different sensors here
Sensors like Moisture level of soil, Temperature of the area,
air moisture and Water Level are used. They are attached to
a breadboard which is intern connected to the Arduino
Board. The data from the board is sent to the Arduino IDE.
The programming language that is used runs instructions
which extracts the data and reflects. If the data is not valid
then the process ends is clearly shown in Fig. 9 and Fig. 10
Fig . 7 Bread Board

Fig.9 Proposed system

Fig.8 Jumper wires

A breadboard is a solider less contrivance for ad interim
template with test circuit designs. A bounce wire (generally
called jumper, jumper wire, jumper interface, DuPont wire,
or DuPont interface – named for one creator of them) is an
electrical wire or social occasion of them in a connection
with a connector or stick at each end (or from time to time
without them– essentially "tinned"), which is commonly
utilized to interconnect the sections of a breadboard or other
model or test circuit, inside or with other hardware or parts,
without soldering. Singular bob wires are attached by
implanted their "end connectors" into the initial way gave in Fig.10 Data flow diagram of the proposed system
a breadboard, the header connector of a circuit board, or a
touch of test outfit. V. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROPOSED
SYSTEM
IV. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
In the proposed system, we effectively develop a
The primary aim of the study is to develop a framework framework which can help in a programmed water system
to stay track of remote soil wetness from an abroad area and gadget through concentrate the dampness level of the field.
to deal with the moisture of soil so it doesn't influences the The shrewd water system contraption ends up being a

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 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)

valuable gadget since it robotizes and manages the watering sensor, humidity sensor, Soil moisture sensor and water level
with no guide intercession. The essential bundles for this sensor indicated as attributes as A1,A2,A3,A4 respectively.
mission are for agriculturists and plant specialists who do
now not have enough time to water plants. Table 1. SAMPLE DATASET

The dampness sensors and temperature sensor degree the

dampness degree (water substance) and temperature of the
unmistakable vegetation. On the off chance that the Created at Created entry
dampness level is situated to be underneath the coveted level, Date Time id A1 A2 A3 A4
the dampness sensor sends the flag to the Arduino board 09 March 07:22:2 107
which triggers the Water Pump to appear ON and supply the 2019 4 113 35 51 49 6
water to particular plant. The machine might be likewise 23 March 07:28:3
drawn out for out of entryways utilization. The working 2019 1 191 40 72 48 547
model of the proposed system was depicted in Fig.11 and 17 March 06:18:2
Fig.12. 2019 4 138 37 71 44 589
22 March 07:19:5 132
2019 2 118 29 68 40 4
13 March 07:27:1
2019 6 132 32 51 49 562
23 March 08:05:1 112
2019 0 174 37 61 33 9
09 March 07:21:2
2019 8 165 36 61 45 703
19 March 06:01:5
2019 4 172 33 77 45 674
21 March 08:36:2 137
2019 6 180 38 53 34 9
20 March 07:37:2 123
2019 6 180 26 78 32 0
08 March 08:49:1 138
2019 1 176 28 50 28 5
14 March 07:48:1
2019 1 113 36 70 25 421
20 March 08:08:3 140
Fig 11. Working model of the proposed system 2019 6 105 38 57 35 1
10 March 06:59:3 136
2019 7 108 29 71 46 9
11 March 06:30:2
2019 2 159 40 78 27 304
14 March 07:46:5 124
2019 5 105 32 71 37 2
23 March 07:03:5
2019 2 130 36 61 33 948
16 March 07:50:1
2019 5 148 39 79 39 356
08 March 06:10:0
2019 9 128 30 80 31 625
05 March 06:09:1
Fig 12. Complete connection of the proposed model 2019 0 107 26 67 35 729
20 March 08:58:2
VI. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS 2019 6 175 36 71 31 659
The experiment was carried out by taking the input from 23 March 06:33:0
the DHT11 sensor. The moisture sensor gives analog output 2019 5 159 38 64 43 986
which can be read through the ESP8266 NodeMCU analog 26 March 07:02:1
pin A0. Since the NodeMCU cannot give output voltage 2019 4 108 34 55 25 368
greater than 3.3V from its GPIO so we are using a relay 19 March 06:21:1 138
module to drive the 5V motor pump. Also the Moisture 2019 9 146 34 57 43 8
sensor and DHT11 sensor is powered from external 5V 28 March 08:11:0
power supply. 2019 7 161 25 65 41 589
The data collected from various sensors are listed in the 19 March 08:14:1
table below. Table.1 contains the data from Temperature 2019 8 146 34 66 39 804

5
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 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)

29 March 07:02:3
2019 4 186 33 56 34 827
11 March 08:40:5
2019 2 158 28 65 50 545
07 March 07:10:1
2019 8 163 32 72 34 785
04 March 07:26:4 126
2019 7 129 33 58 33 2
19 March 08:12:4
2019 2 136 32 67 27 680
27 March 06:31:0 111 Fig.15 Soil moisture recorded by soil moisture sensor
2019 6 103 37 69 45 1
16 March 07:25:2 146 The water level sensor is used to record the water level
2019 3 199 31 73 47 9 from the various places of the fields of the Vellore districts.
08 March 06:42:4 This is clearly shown in the following Fig. 16.
2019 3 190 37 76 29 428
10 March 06:49:0
2019 4 189 40 65 30 916

The temperature recorded by the DTH11sensor from the

various dates and from various time period on various places
of Vellore shown below in Fig. 13.

Fig 16. Water level recorded by water level sensor

These data are imported in the thingspeak cloud for the
visualization and the correlation between the temperature and
humidity is calculated. The correlation between the
temperature and humidity places important role in watering
the plants. So based on the correlation we can start the
irrigation system or switch off. The correlation is shown in
the following Fig. 17 using the Mat lab visualization app
using thingspeaks.
Fig 13. Temperature recorded by DTH-11 Sensor
Similarly, the humidity recorded by the DTH11 sensor
form the various places are depicted in the graph below as
Fig. 14.

Fig 17. Correlation map between temperature and

humidity
The working space of Arduino was depicted in the Fig.18

Fig 14. Humidity recorded by DTH-11 Sensor

The soil moisture level recorded by the soil moister
sensors are depicted graphically in Fig.15.

Fig. 18 Arduino workspace

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 2020 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ic-ETITE)
The novelty of the proposed work is that so far much of
the research related with irrigation system usually record the
data and send SMS or alarm to the owners to indicate the
need of watering or to switch off the water supply. But the
proposed work automatically switch on and off using the
data recorded by various sensor. Also the recorded data is
stored in the cloud for future purpose.
VII . CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The sand and the water level are the critical parameter for
the development of smart irrigation system. Generally, the
soil moisture is affected by a sundry parameters such as air
temperature, soil temperature, air humidity, ultra violet rays,
and much more. This paper proposed an IoT based smart
irrigation system utilizing sensors to record the data and
store it in the cloud storage. The future work can be
prediction of soil moisture using the recorded data and it may
provide cost effective. The auto mode makes it a smart
system and it can be further customized for application
categorical scenarios. The future plan is to conduct a water
saving analysis based on proposed algorithm with multiple
nodes along with minimizing the system cost.
References
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