2. Literature Review
2.2. Smart Farming Applications
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Radio Frequency Identification. This system is capable, by using radio waves, to transmit a unique serial number of a thing, that could be a person or an object (Violino, 2005). All the data collected is stored in the cloud. According to Goran Čandrlić, over 1 Exabyte of data was stored in the cloud by 2013, which means 1.073,741,824 Gigabytes of data; moreover, by 2016, a big amount of companies worldwide started to store sensitive date of their customers in public clouds (Čandrlić, 2013). On the next section of this research, these concepts will be widely explained.
2.2. Smart Farming Applications
Once the concept, the developments, and applications of the Internet of Things have stayed, it is the next step to focus the research to the smart farming; this is the application of IoT to the agricultural field. In fact, the smart farming is basically the application of current and innovative information and communication technologies into agriculture, with the purpose of improve the production processes, increase farmers’ revenue, develop efficiency, productivity, as well as, generate positive impacts to the society and the people, such as environmental care, smart and planned production, risk mitigation, and so on (Köksal & Tekinerdogan, 2018).
Many applications have appeared since the concept of smart farming first came up, such us smart irrigation, environmental forecast, devices automation, etc. each of the generates improvements in important parts of the agricultural production process. Figure 2 shows the most important applications of smart agriculture nowadays.
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Figure 2 Smart Agriculture Applications
Source: (Ravi Gorli, 2017)
It is a fact that one of the most important elements that affect the economy of a country is agriculture because it is not only part of the benefits of the society, but also a way of living. It is important to mention that smart farming has become a profitable business thanks to its useful and multiple applications. Some of the most popular are high precision crop control, automated farming techniques, and many others based on data collection that offers important advantages to the farming world. Indeed, smart farming is supposed to play a significant role in the coming years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, due to the growing population of the Earth, by 2050 the world will have to be able to produce seventy percent more food than the produced in 2006 in order to fulfill the hunger of people (Ravi Gorli, 2017). With this information as fact, farmers need to start improving their processes, that is the reason why people, farmers, and companies already started to open their processes to the Internet of Things.
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2.2.1. Sensors and Actuators
The sensors and actuators play an important role in smart farming applications. The decision of which of them should be used depends only on the outcome willing to obtain.
Currently, there are in the market as many sensors as one can imagine something that could be sensed, and in several areas and applications, for instance gas sensors, commonly used for collecting data regarding pollution; sensors for monitoring the quality of the water; cameras for recording video and microphones for audio; and also traditional and common sensors such as moisture, temperature, environmental, pressure sensors, water flow, wind, atmospheric, and so on (Sharma, K., Bhondekar, Ghanshyam, & Ojha).
2.2.2. Communication Technologies
After the information is collected it has to be transmitted for further processing within the IoT functionality. With respect to this many companies started to work in different communication technologies. Indeed, since there are different kinds of sensors, there are different kind of data platform-as-aa that need to be transmitted; therefore, there have to be as much different communication technologies as needed to satisfy the demand of the IoT developing industry. The most common technologies, among others, are the LTE (Long-Term Evolution), supporting the IoT applications with features like longer battery life, longer range and lower cost (PRNewswire, 2017); the already well-known Wifi and Mobile phone 2G, 3G, and 4G; also, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), explained in the previous section; ZigBee, a low-cost and low-power-consumption wireless communication standard (ZigBeeAlliance, 2012); 6LoWPAN, and so on. (Sharma, K., Bhondekar, Ghanshyam, & Ojha).
2.2.3. Cloud Technologies
Another main component of the IoT applications is the development of cloud computing
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technology. This system is changing every industry; in fact, it is broadly used in many businesses and, of course, in e-commerce-related companies. In general terms, the cloud computing is a disk drive, which can be private, public, hybrid, or communal, regarding the ownership, that is able to store, analyze, process and interpret any kind of data. This technology provides the user open accessibility from any place and any time through the internet, in order to provide a user-friendly service (Ngak, 2012).
The clouds are made of two layers. On the first one, called front end layer, there is the user, the application, the user interface, and everything that the user interacts with. On the other hand, on the back end layer, there are the servers, the computers that run the applications, and the storage systems. Finally, the middleware which is the software that allows computers to communicate with each other (Čandrlić, 2013). Based on the service to be provided, the clouds are classified in IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). The following graph illustrates how the whole IoT system works based on the concepts explained above:
Figure 3 IOT Deployment Scenario
Source: (Sharma, K., Bhondekar, Ghanshyam, & Ojha)
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oil-exporting economy. It is located right in the middle of the world where the equator line passes (Latitude 0°). It is a privileged area of the globe in terms of ecosystems, climate, land, temperature, and environmental conditions. Ecuador is a country with a vast natural wealth within its four regions, Coast, Andes, Amazon, and Galapagos Islands, each one different from the other. The capital city is Quito; the official currency of the Country is the US Dollar; the official language is Spanish; and, According to the Ecuadorian National Statistics and Censuses Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Cesnsos , 2019), by 2019 there are 19,257,925 Ecuadorians. Gross Domestic Product totaled 99.9 billion in 2016 and 104.3 billion in 2017.According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the following numbers represent the summary of Ecuador’s area-related information:
Table 2 Ecuador’s Areas Information Ecuador's Areas Information
Country Area Land Area Agricultural Area Forest Area
25,637 24,836 5,516 12,469.15
(numbers in 1000 ha)
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016
Since 1970, the main source of revenue of the country is petrol extraction and exportation.
Besides this, Ecuador still has an agricultural-based economy. In fact, agricultural activities still play an important role in the Ecuadorian economy. It represents almost 10% of the Gross Domestic Product for the last ten years, and even higher percentages in the previous years. In