An IoT-based intelligent irrigation system with data fusion and a self-powered wide-area network

Water resources have a great influence on human society, but saving water in irrigation still remains a challenge. This article proposes an intelligent irrigation system that integrates a data fusion model and a long-rang (LoRa) network for optimizing the watering schedule. A data fusion model is proposed, which first adopts the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to simulate and predict the proper watering demands by integrating multi-source heterogeneous data, that is, historical weather data, user irrigation logs, weather forecasts, and online monitoring sensor data. A self-powered wide-area network is implemented and deployed by using LoRa to facilitate multiple Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. It includes a gateway and two types of nodes: a valve node and a sensing node. The node is capable of energy autonomy through the scheme of waterflow-based power generation, thus realizing maintenance-free throughout the life cycle. A cloud platform is designed to provide network management, intelligent irrigation control, and the interface of the mobile application. The proposed system is evaluated through a case study of landscape watering. On average, the proposed system achieves a water-saving efficiency of 94.74% compared with the conventional manual setting solutions.