CLUSTER BASED AGRICULTURAL IOT: A REAL-WORLD HARDWARE EVOLUTION

The rapid impacts of climate change and rising global food demand necessitate innovative approaches to farming that are efficient, scalable, and sustainable.This seminar presents a real-world hardware evaluation of a "Cluster-Based Agricultural Internet of Things (CA-IoT)" framework designed to address these challenges.Unlike traditional centralized or infrastructure-dependent IoT solutions, the proposed CA-IoT leverages a cluster-based architecture implemented with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, including Raspberry Pi 3B+, Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) modules, and low-cost environmental sensors.By minimizing intra-node communication distances, enabling fault-tolerant cluster management, and ensuring energy efficiency, the system supports precision farming applications such as soil monitoring and automated irrigation.Hardware test-beds were deployed and validated in both indoor and outdoor farm environments in the USA and Senegal, demonstrating robust performance under diverse climatic conditions.The results highlight that the CA-IoT is simple to deploy, location-independent, and affordable, making it accessible even to smallholder farmers with limited technical expertise.This work establishes a scalable and context-relevant IoT solution for agriculture, contributing to the global agenda of smart farming and sustainable food security.Agricultural IoT (Agri-IoT)