A system architecture for intelligent agriculture based on edge computing

Agricultural informatisation has been an extraordinary aspect in the field of agriculture due to advancement in communication technologies. Many studies have been conducted to assist production, such as Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Cloud Computing. However, few studies have been focused on the severe requirements of delay and energy consumption of the mobile node. In order to improve network performance, edge computing is introduced into our system architecture for intelligent agriculture. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a distributed computing architecture to offload some tasks to the edge of core network. We adopt a hierarchical structure made of three layers: physical perception layer, information service layer and intelligent application layer. In addition, we further confirm an offloading model for intelligent agriculture. In this article, the state-of-the-art development in intelligent agriculture and current approach of its key technology are discussed. Their potential opportunities and challenges in proposed architecture are presented as well.