Network Architecture of a Fog–Cloud-Based Smart Farming System

With the rapid increase in the human population and urbanization worldwide, the demand for food production has played a significant role in driving the integration of technology into agriculture. Various Cloud-based systems, such as livestock tracking systems, have been proposed. In those systems, data were collected by the sensors and sent to the Cloud for processing. However, significant issues with those systems were noted, such as high bandwidth utilization and security concerns, such as a high volume of row data traveling from the data collection devices (such as sensors) to the Cloud through the Internet. Additionally, the long distance between the Cloud and the data collection devices makes it unsuitable for latency-sensitive livestock disease monitoring and tracking systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a Fog–Cloud-based approach, where the processing is conducted at the Fog layer, closer to the data collection devices, and only the result is sent to the Cloud for remote viewing. The proposed method aims to reduce power consumption and latency in communication. To validate the proposed method, both the Cloud-based and Fog–Cloud-based scenarios are simulated using iFogSim (a novel simulation tool for IoT and Cloud computing), and the result shows that there is less than twice the power consumption in some scenarios and that the time consumed in the proposed Fog–Cloud-based system, depending on the number of sensors, is five to ten times lower. This study further supports the point that the Fog–Cloud-based is suitable for latency-dependent farming systems such as livestock tracking systems.