IoT-Based Smart Farming Architecture Using Federated Learning: a Nitrous Oxide Emission Prediction Use Case

Precision agriculture and smart farming can enable real-time decision-making to optimize resources and lower costs via data-driven model predictions. Adoption rates of smart farming systems are unfortunately low due to farmers’ privacy concerns and the high initial monetary costs of deploying such systems. High monetary costs can be lowered by replacing expensive sensing equipment with machine learning models. Cloud computing can be used to train models, but this suffers from poor privacy. Instead, fog and edge computing can train local models, but important geographical trends may be lost due to data segmentation. Federated learning can be used to address these challenges. A privacy-aware Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart farming architecture that uses federated learning was proposed. A prototype was deployed to gather sensor data from a local Canadian smart farm in Ottawa, Ontario. For various data-driven models, we perform nitrous oxide prediction experiments using centralized, local, federated, and distributed ensemble learning. We found that federated and ensemble learning can compete similarly well with centralized learning. Our results demonstrate that our methodology can potentially replace expensive nitrous oxide emission sensing equipment using inexpensive sensors combined with predictive analytics models.