=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2030/HAICTA_2017_paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Review on the Trends and Challenges of Cloud Computing Technology in Climate - Smart Agriculture
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2030/HAICTA_2017_paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-2030
|authors=Eleni Symeonaki,Konstantinos Arvanitis,Dimitrios Piromalis
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/SymeonakiAP17
}}
==Review on the Trends and Challenges of Cloud Computing Technology in Climate - Smart Agriculture==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2030/HAICTA_2017_paper9.pdf
Review on the Trends and Challenges of Cloud
Computing Technology in Climate - Smart Agriculture
Eleni Symeonaki1, Konstantinos Arvanitis2, Dimitrios Piromalis3
1
Department of NRM & Ag. Eng., Agricultural University of Athens, Ιera Odos 75, 11855,
Athens, Greece, e-mail: esimeon@puas.gr
2
Department of NRM & Ag. Eng., Agricultural University of Athens, Ιera Odos 75, 11855,
Athens, Greece, e-mail: karvan@aua.gr
3
Department of Automation Engineering, PUAS, 250 Thivon & P. Ralli, 12244, Aigaleo,
Greece, e-mail: piromali@puas.gr
Abstract. Climate-Smart Agriculture is an approach for guiding actions
required to help stakeholders around the world, identify and develop strategies
in order to make agriculture more productive and sustainable. Cloud
computing, as a trend of future information technology applied in various
fields, may play a significant role in agricultural informatization by bringing
some new prospects to information management and service. Evolving cloud
computing technology in agriculture is an extensive opportunity to carry out
industry agricultural applications aiming in the development of services in
rural areas. Agriculture, and especially climate-smart agriculture, is a field
which is benefited with the applications of cloud computing with regard to
resources sharing, cost saving and efficient agro systems construction. The
purpose of this survey is to examine the technological background of cloud
computing, as well as to review its applications in agricultural informatization,
focusing particularly on the trends and challenges regarding the field of
climate-smart agriculture.
Keywords: Climate-Smart Agriculture, Cloud Computing, ICT, Information
Management.
1 Introduction
The sector of agriculture is going to face enormous challenges as, according to Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the total agricultural
production should be increased by 60% in order to meet all nutritional needs of the
constantly growing world population. This goal has to be achieved despite the
impacts of climate change in global agricultural production and the fact that many of
the resources required are already stretched (70% of the world's fresh water supplies
is consumed for agricultural purposes). Moreover, taking into consideration the land
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use change emissions, it is estimated that the agricultural sector, generates about one-
quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions (FAO, 2013).
Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an approach for guiding actions required to
help stakeholders, from local to national and international levels, identify and
develop strategies in order to make agriculture more productive and sustainable. CSA
provides the means to relate actions both on-farm as well as beyond the farm, by
incorporating elements concerning policies, institutions, investments and
technologies as following (FAO, 2013):
- Farm, cultivation and livestock management for handling resources efficiently
as well as increasing production and resilience.
- Ecosystem and landscape management in conserving ecosystem services that
are essential in order to increase resource efficiency and resilience at the same
time.
- Services for farmers and land managers so as to enable them to implement
changes which are necessary for the efficient management of climate
risks/impacts and mitigation actions.
- Changes which enhance the benefits of CSA in the wider food system,
including value chain interventions as well as demand-side measures.
One way of addressing these issues and increase the quantity together with the
quality of agricultural production is by using cutting edge technologies in order to
establish more “intelligent” and interconnected farms through agricultural
informatization.
As far as agricultural development is concerned, the implementation of
Information Communication Technology (ICT) is a major asset for the sustainable
growth in agriculture. In past few years, the research focused on agricultural
infrastructure development and information service. In order this situation to be
changed and promote a rapid development of agricultural informatization, it is
essential to apply technologies which provide reliable, cheaper and user friendly ICT
tools in agriculture.
Cloud computing, as a trend of future information technology applied in various
fields, may play a significant role in agricultural informatization by bringing some
new prospects to information management and service. Evolving cloud computing
technology in agriculture is an extensive opportunity to carry out industry
agricultural applications aiming in the development of services in rural areas.
Meanwhile, the innovative technology of the Internet of Things (IoT) is highly
related to cloud computing as IoT acquires compelling computing tools through
cloud computing and cloud computing encounters the optimum channel of practice
based on IoT. Thus, the integration of these technologies, using Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), for data acquisition and
monitoring corresponding to cultivations, as well as cloud computing applications for
transferring, storing and processing these data using the Internet, is predicted to bring
revolutionary changes to agriculture, through the automation of agricultural
production.
The study of cloud computing in agriculture is of important theoretical and
practical significance. The purpose of this survey is to examine the technological
background of cloud computing, as well as to review its applications in agricultural
67
informatization, focusing particularly on the trends and challenges regarding the field
of climate-smart agriculture.
2 Overview of Cloud Computing Technology
Cloud Computing, often referred to simply as “the cloud”, has been characterized
as “the fifth utility service”, along with water, electricity, gas, and telephone, for it
provides readily available on demand computing services, similarly to any other
utility service which is available in modern society (Buyya et al., 2009).
Although the popularity of the term “Cloud Computing” was launched in 2006
when Amazon.com introduced the first widely accessible cloud computing service
under the name of “Elastic Compute Cloud- EC2”, it could be argued that as a
concept it has emerged since the 1960’s (Kleinrock, 2005; Armbrust et al., 2009;
Wheeler and Waggener, 2009).
As it appears from literature there are various perspectives concerning the
definition of “Cloud Computing” (Staten, 2008; Vouk, 2008; Armbrust et al., 2009;
Buyya et al., 2009; Plummer et al., 2009; Vaquero et al., 2009; Mell and Grance,
2010) among which, the most recognized and generally accepted is the one stated by
Mell and Grance on behalf of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST). In particular, according to NIST, Cloud Computing is defined as
“a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared
pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction”.
Fig. 1. Anatomy of Cloud Computing according to NIST (Craig-Wood, 2010).
68
Moreover, NIST suggests that the anatomy of Cloud Computing consists of five
essential characteristics, three service layers, and four deployment models as shown
in Fig. 1 (Mell and Grance, 2010).
Preferably, a cloud should involve all of the five essential characteristics, while as
far it concerns the four deployment models, public cloud is the one that “cloud
computing” has been initially referred to and is most commonly used. The other
deployment models constitute variations of the public cloud, sharing similar
characteristics and service layers (Rountree and Castrillo, 2014). The three service
layers refer to the services offered by the cloud providers and are described
depending on user requirements as following:
a) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Due to recent developments in network
management and virtualization, cloud infrastructure provides processing, storage,
traffic monitoring and re-directing, as well as other forms of lower level hardware
and network resources in a virtual way via the Internet network. These resources are
offered upon the demand of the end user and are charged per use, differentiating from
traditional hosting services in which physical servers or parts of them, are offered
and charged on a periodical basis (Leavitt, 2009; Rountree and Castrillo, 2014).
Moreover, end users have control over operating systems, deployed applications,
storage, and in some cases limited control over selected network components (e.g.
host firewalls), without the need of managing or controlling the underlying cloud
infrastructure (Mell and Grance, 2009). Some researchers suggest to further divide
IaaS into Hardware as a Service - HaaS and Data as a Service - DaaS (Wang et al.,
2008), but it is more common for IaaS to be regarded as a whole concept.
b) Platform as a Service (PaaS): This service layer is more advanced than the IaaS
one, for it acts as an integrated design, development, testing, and deployment
platform and provides the end user with programming and execution environments
such as operating systems, programming languages, databases, and web servers. End
users are given the ability to develop their own applications directly onto the cloud
infrastructure, after creating them by using programming languages and APIs
supported by the provider. In addition, end users have total control over their
deployed applications without being responsible for the management or control of the
underlying cloud infrastructure such as network, servers, operating systems or
storage (Mell and Grance, 2009). This kind of approach reduces most of the system
administrative responsibilities (e.g. setting up and switching among development,
testing and production environment) that are traditionally assigned to the developers,
enabling them to concentrate on more productive issues. (Lawton, 2008). Finally
PaaS carries some other appealing features including embedded instruments for
measuring the deployed applications usage for charging purposes as well as
established online communities for cooperation, interaction and problem solving
purposes (Rountree and Castrillo, 2014).
c) Software as a Service (SaaS): Through this service end users are provided, upon
their demand, with complete turnkey solutions of software applications or even more
of sophisticated systems, such as CRM or ERP, directly via the Internet network
(Leavitt, 2009). These kind of solutions are hosted as services in the cloud and are
delivered via browsers, correspondingly to user subscriptions. SaaS is also
characterized by a multi-tenant architecture according which, all users share a single
code base maintained by the provider. Authorization and authentication security
69
policies are employed in order to guarantee the partition of user data. Due to this
sharing mechanism the cost of the services provided is far more appealing compared
to the traditional off-the-shelf and bespoke ones (Wang et al., 2008). Such an
approach eliminates the workload of installing, running, as well as maintaining
applications on local computers and reduces the cost of software purchases due to on-
demand pricing policies.
Summing up, cloud computing is designed to integrate a perfect system, which is
able of distributing high computing power to the end users by combining computer,
storage and network technologies (including grid, distributed, parallel and utility
computing) with regard to load balance and reutilization (Ding and Yan, 2012).
3 Cloud Computing Technology in Climate - Smart Agriculture
Cloud computing is a cutting edge technology which has great impact in
climate-smart agriculture as it provides efficient management of resources and higher
production by facilitating the storage, management, access and dissemination of
information. Furthermore, a primary reason for adopting cloud computing in
agriculture is to support farmers in making decisions and drawing strategies related
to cultivations.
3.1 Features of Cloud Computing in Agriculture
Α brief overview of the features provided in agriculture through cloud computing
technology is presented as following:
- Data acquisition and remote storage: Several of the available data acquisition
tools, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors and Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN) can be effectively integrated with cloud computing
applications for temperature humidity, luminosity, soil moisture monitoring,
etc. (Hori et al., 2010). Moreover cloud computing provides high storage
capacity suitable for the backup of such large scale of data and information
relevant to cultivations, offering in addition a suitable infrastructure for
decision support as well as mutual information and experience sharing among
the worldwide agricultural community (Feng, 2010).
- Low-cost access to ICT resources: Cloud computing provides access to
extensive ICT resources which are offered upon the demand of the user and
are charged per use. In this way farmers can access the required resources on-
demand from the cloud, instead of investing in owning expensive ICT
hardware infrastructure (Prasad et al. 2013).
- Online agriculture experts consultation: In the situations when farmers are not
able to solve any occasional problems they may face at the different stages of
agricultural production, cloud computing offers a sufficient alternative, as
online expert advice could be found in the repository of the cloud databases.
Therefore, farmers could face any problem instantly, as they receive
immediate and accurate respond (Wenshun, 2011).
70
- Land records automation: Due to the accessibility of large scale storage
infrastructure, land records are being digitized world-widely. Cloud
computing storage facility offers a feature of entering and storing a land
record along with any descriptions which are relative to that particular region,
such as production history, soil analysis result, etc. Various public or private
operators are responsible of the data accuracy after the proper verification of
facts and figures (Hori et al., 2010).
- Weather Forecasting: Cloud computing may provide farmers with weather
forecast and analytics for specific time periods so that they can take decisions
related to cultivations (TongKe, 2013).
3.2 Applications of Cloud Computing Technology in Agriculture
In literature there can be found various applications of cloud computing technology
designed to meet the needs of agricultural sector. Some of these applications are
briefly overviewed as following:
Fig. 2. MAD-framework Architecture.
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a) Agriculture cloud based on MAD-Cloud architecture: It offers specialized
services to farmers regarding crops cultivation, fertilizers usage, pest control, etc. In
addition, researchers in the field of agriculture can access the cultivation history of
multiple regions and add their suggestions regarding innovative agricultural
techniques. Last but not least, existing cloud infrastructures like networks, servers
etc. can be used and various services are supported regarding the interaction with the
cloud by using IoT features such as sensors, mobile devices, GPS etc. MAD-cloud
framework as shown in Fig. 2 is based on a layered architecture consisting of three
layers (Chandraul and Singh, 2013):
- MAD-Data Acquisition Layer (MDAL)
- MAD-Data Processing Layer (MDPL)
- MAD-Data Storage Service Layer (MDSSL)
b) Cloud Agro System: It is a cloud computing based system designed to monitor
the overall information related to agricultural activities. Up to date IT tools provide
online language translation mechanisms in order to overcome language and tradition
limitations in worldwide agricultural community. As a result, any type of information
stored on the cloud is presented to the user’s language of choice, supporting any
decisions related to crops production. Furthermore, through sophisticated features,
such as online questionnaires, researchers can exploit the experience of farmers
worldwide in the development of new agricultural tools and techniques (Patel and
Patel, 2013).
c) Agricultural mobile cloud-based platform: It is a concept model of Mobile
Cloud Computing (MCC) technology which assists farmers to achieve relatively
better cultivation and marketing by using simple handheld devices such as laptops,
tablets and smartphones which support 2.5G, 3G or 4G technologies. In this
application a mobile server is established including Application Service Providers
(ASP) which offer to farmers on-demand software services via a network
architecture. The developer is connected to the ASP and users are connected to the
mobile infrastructure providing application features and services which are designed
to be user friendly (Prasad, 2013).
Fig. 3. Mobile Cloud Computing a) System Model and b) Proposed Services
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d) WSAN linked to agricultural cloud computing system: This approach integrates
Wireless Sensor Actor Networks (WSANs) with cloud computing services to assist
farmers optimize the usage of available resources in agricultural production.
Environmental data from the fields are acquired by the sensors and process with the
help of a decision support unit for actuating the process. Sensor nodes which acquire
environmental data and a group of actor nodes which operate according to the
decision taken by the decision support system are interconnected with wireless
medium. The layered architecture shown in Fig. 4 consists of three groups: sensing
group, cloud service group and actuator group (Mahesh et al., 2014).
Fig. 4. Agricultural WSAN Cloud
e) PDCA cycle based agricultural cloud services: According to this perspective the
process of agriculture production is regarded as a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle
as shown in Fig 5. Based on this process, primary sensing and knowledge
management techniques are principally used to provide cloud services. Production
data related to weather and soil, crop images, farming observations and cultivated
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plots of land are routinely collected. In addition analysis engines, such as data
miners, are employed for analyzing the stored data and provide advice as well as
suggestions concerning the agricultural production (Hori et al., 2010).
Fig. 5. PDCA Cycle and Cloud Services in Agriculture
3.3 Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Computing in Agriculture
Agriculture, and especially climate-smart agriculture, is a field which is highly
benefited with the applications of cloud computing with regard to resources sharing,
cost saving and efficient agro systems construction. Moreover, the integration of
agricultural processes with cloud computing has given a significant impetus to
production, marketing and sales of agricultural goods. In particular, cloud computing
technology in agriculture presents the following advantages (Prasad et al., 2010; Gao
et al., 2011):
- Data management is performed by the service provider guarantying better and
efficiently organized information resources.
- Stakeholders can access information at any time or location from the e-data
bank databases.
- Communication and interaction among users worldwide is expeditive, effortless
and of sufficient security.
- Maintenance infrastructure requirements are drastically reduced as service
providers are responsible for all technical issues.
- Security is enhanced as all data and resources are stored in the cloud and
maintained centrally by the service providers.
- Farmers and researchers are motivated to get more involved into the field of
climate-smart agriculture as all communication attempts are result oriented.
74
- The problem of rural-urban migration can be reduced as cloud computing
services are provided remotely at any time. This will aspect might also aid in
unemployment control.
- Due to the mass involvement of different stakeholders, the implementation of
cloud computing technology in agriculture might boost sustainable growth and
economic development.
Despite the overall growth of the agricultural sector due to the employment of
cloud computing, certain concerns are beholden as well.
One of the main concerns is related to security and privacy, as sensitive data are
delivered to a third party and might be compromised by eventual hacking attacks due
to deficient maintenance and supervision of the security systems. This problem might
be solved through the careful selection of reputed and reliable cloud service
providers (Ashktorab and Taghizadeh, 2012).
Another constraint of major importance is linked to the requirements of cloud
computing services in constant and high-speed network connectivity. In order for
farmers to take advantage of cloud computing technology benefits it is essential to
ensure better and low-cost network coverage in distant rural areas (Dalvi and
Kumbhar 2014).
A final constraint regarding the use of cloud computing in the field of agriculture
is the extent of computer illiteracy in rural areas as most farmers are not able to
understand the functions of software and internet or complete tasks and solve
problems on a computer without assistance. Hence, training centers should be
established in order to offer guidance regarding computer skills and cloud computing
services usage (Dalvi and Kumbhar 2014).
4 Conclusions
Cloud computing finds application in almost every field of production and
services. Agriculture is one of the fields which could be highly benefitted from the
features offered by this innovative technology. Cloud computing provides modern
agriculture equipment, weather observation and forecasting, agriculture planting and
breeding technology, as well as production organization and management methods.
Furthermore, it interconnects the farmers, being able to exchange knowledge and
experience through communication and information sharing. Modernization of
agriculture by communicating rapidly the knowledge about new techniques improves
the utilization of natural resources, reduces climate dependency, assists in
environment and ecosystem protection and promotes sustainable development.
Therefore, the future growth of agriculture is depended on the adaptation of new
technologies with a focus on farmer needs such as cloud computing. The use of
appropriate technologies aids the agricultural community in terms of accessibility
and affordability. Cloud computing in climate-smart agriculture provides a
convenient environment for services and innovations in a flexible regulatory
environment.
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Acknowledgments. Authors would like to thank Agricultural University of Athens
as well as the Postgraduate (MSc) Program of Studies, “Industrial Automation” of
the Automation Engineering Dept. of the Piraeus University of Applied Sciences, for
providing the required funding in order to undertake this research project.
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