Advances in Internet of Things, 2021, 11, 77-93 https://www.scirp.org/journal/ait ISSN Online: 2161-6825 ISSN Print: 2161-6817 IoT Based Greenhouse Real-Time Data Acquisition and Visualization through Message Queuing Telemetry Transfer (MQTT) Protocol Vincent de Paul Niyigena Kwizera1, Zhanming Li1*, Victus Elikplim Lumorvie2, Febronie Nambajemariya3, Xiaowei Niu1 1School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Lanzhou University of Technology, Qilihe District, Lanzhou, China 2School of Computer and Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Qilihe District, Lanzhou, China 3School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, China How to cite this paper: Niyigena Kwizera, Abstract V.D.P., Li, Z.M., Elikplim Lumorvie, V., Nambajemariya, F. and Niu, X.W. (2021) One of the most indispensable needs of life is food and its worldwide availa- IoT Based Greenhouse Real-Time Data bility endorsement has made agriculture an essential sector in recent years. Acquisition and Visualization through Mes- As the technology evolved, the need to maintain a good and suitable climate sage Queuing Telemetry Transfer (MQTT) in the greenhouse became imperative to ensure that the indoor plants are Protocol. Advances in Internet of Things, 11, 77-93. more productive hence the agriculture sector was not left behind. That not- https://doi.org/10.4236/ait.2021.112006 withstanding, the introduction and deployment of IoT technology in agricul- ture solves many problems and increases crop production. This paper focuses Received: March 24, 2021 mainly on the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in acquiring real- Accepted: April 27, 2021 Published: April 30, 2021 time data of environmental parameters in the greenhouse. Various IoT tech- nologies that can be applicable in greenhouse monitoring system was pre- Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and sented and in the proposed model, a method is developed to send the air Scientific Research Publishing Inc. temperature and humidity data obtained by the DHT11 sensor to the cloud This work is licensed under the Creative using an ESP8266-based NodeMCU and firstly to the cloud platform Thing- Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). Speak, and then to Adafruit.IO in which MQTT protocol was used for the re- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ception of sensor data to the application layer referred as Human-Machine Open Access Interface. The system has been completely implemented in an actual proto- type, allowing the acquiring of data and the publisher/subscriber concept used for communication. The data is published with a broker’s aid, which is responsible for transferring messages to the intended clients based on topic choice. Lastly, the functionality testing of MQTT was carried out and the re- sults showed that the messages are successfully published. Keywords Greenhouse, Sensors, Monitoring System, Internet of Things (IOT), DOI: 10.4236/ait.2021.112006 Apr. 30, 2021 77 Advances in Internet of Things V. D. P. Niyigena Kwizera et al. ThingSpeak, Data Visualization, MQTT, Adafruit.IO, MQTT Testing 1. Introduction The Greenhouse system enclosure allows the management and control of the crop ecosystem resulting in increased crop production, longer production time, enhanced product quality, and less defensive chemicals [1]. To achieve this, the agriculture industry is bound to adopt the Internet of Things because its intro- duction in the agricultural sector can solve many problems for farmers [2]. Ac- cording to recent statistics, IoT systems installation in the agriculture sector is rising at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent (20% CAGR). It is esti- mated in [3] that the number of connected devices is growing from 13 million to 225 million in the period of 10 years (2014-2024). With the current development worldwide, a lot of agricultural lands have been used in other non-agricultural areas, such as buildings, industrial sites, and other infrastructures, which will undoubtedly lower the agricultural production and have negative impacts on environments and economy in general. With this problem, the need of develop- ing new technologies to close and cover this gap is increasing day-to-day. One solution that the community can implement is to create an agricultural system with limited land availability commonly called urban farming or urban agricul- ture. Smart farming IoT platform based on edge and cloud computing was pro- posed in [4]. In this work, Miguel A. Zamora-Izquierdo et al. describes the de- sign, development, and evaluation of a technology that provides automated IoT technology to meet severe PA requirements. It is quite challenging to solve these particular problems such as Soil Fertility Management, Crop Disease, Pest Con- trol, Irrigation and Water Management, etc. in precise monitoring of wide-scale agricultural fields. In [5], N. K. Nawandar and V. R. Satpute designed an IoT- based, low-cost, and intelligent module for smart irrigation systems using three modules as physical part and MQTT with HTTP Protocol for transferring in- formation from field location to the user Daponte P. et al. in [6] also proposes an overview of the different techniques applicable to precision agricultural moni- toring. The drone architecture for multispectral/thermal sensing and DTM/DSM has been discussed. Researchers in the IoT domain must also consider the cloud platform that manages information and various IoT protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and AMQP that are used to communicate and transmit data to the cloud as well as to the end-user in order to keep farmers informed about crop conditions from a remote location. It is expected that the technology will be evaluated further in long-term crop cycles in order to optimize activities and adapt to decision sup- port capability, which will be provided to human operators as management solu- tions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the Back- DOI: 10.4236/ait.2021.112006 78 Advances in Internet of Things V. D. P. Niyigena Kwizera et al. ground Theory and related works, Section 3 shows the Structure and Develop- ment of IoT system in the greenhouse, MQTT Protocols and its application in Greenhouse monitoring is depicted in Section 4, Greenhouse Data Acquisition and Monitoring System design was described in Section 5, Section 6 shows the Experimental results and Discussions and Finally, Conclusions are in Section 7. 2. Background Theory of IoT The researchers defined the Internet of Things (IoT) in many different ways. In general, it is a concept based on combining information technology, sensor technology, wireless communication technology, and internet technology [7]. In [8], IoT is defined as a network of physical objects and devices that are inte- grated with an Internet connection. Also, in [9], they defined IoT as a recent communication paradigm that envisions a near future in which the objects of everyday life will be fitted with sensors, microcontrollers, transceivers for digital communication, and appropriate protocol stacks that will make them able to communicate easily with one another and with the user becoming an integral part of the internet. The Internet of Things (IoT) changed how we live, work, travel, and do busi- ness since 1999, when it was first discovered; it is marking a new industrial transformation, known as Industry 4.0, and key in the digital transformation of organizations, cities, and society as well. Figure 1 shows the roadmap to under- stand the essence of the Internet of Things in the past decades. After the presentation on the application of internet-connected RFID in Proc- ter & Gamble’s supply chain, Ashton identified a future in which computers can collect data and transform it into useful information without human interven- tion [10], which is possible with technology such as sensors and the RFID where computers can observe, interpret and understand the environment. Figure 1. Technology roadmap for the internet of things (IoT) in last two decades. Source: https://www.nsti.org/directory/org.html?i=2218. DOI: 10.4236/ait.2021.112006 79 Advances in Internet of Things V. D. P. Niyigena Kwizera et al. Although RFID’s commercial implementations have continued to draw on its barcode-like characteristics to date, RFID provides far more over the long term and aims to be a core technology for the Internet of Things. The quicker check- out is the most significant benefit of a department store using RFID [11]. 3. Structure and Development of the Greenhouse IoT System Smart agriculture can be represented as a farm or greenhouse fitted with smart objects; a field network enables information to be transmitted between field- installed devices and a gateway to link the smart agriculture sector to the outside world of the internet. These smart objects make it easier to communicate with farmers with real-time information to manage them. Figure 2 shows the Con- ceptual model of the Greenhouse IoT based Monitoring System. IoT Architecture is a network of various elements, such as sensors, actuators, protocols, cloud servers, which make up an IoT networking system. It typically consists of distinct layers that allow system administrators to monitor and ana- lyze the system working. Although some researchers represent it into more lay- ers and name them accordingly based on their conceptions, in [12], Sethi P. et al. differentiated between 3-layers and 5-layers IoT architecture, and in [13] M. Burhan et al. in their comprehensive survey on IoT elements, Layered Architec- tures and Security Issues they compared 3-4-5 layers architecture, more than three layers can be particularly applicable in edge or fog computing IoT system, for 4-layer architecture the support layer that secure cloud computing is added whereas for 5-layer architecture, the business layer is added in order to manage data and applications, business and all profits within the system and the network layer is divide into two layers namely; the transport and processing layers.