IoT lysimeter system with enhanced data security

Abstract

Diverse sources of data related to precision agriculture may be acquired with devices using an IoT architecture. Lysimeters are used to measure the amount of actual evapotranspiration released by plants, which is an important parameter for agriculture. New proposals of lysimeters extend the capabilities of these devices taking advantage of modern electronics, sensors, Internet, and computing devices. The paper presents an IoT based experimental lysimeter system implementation with enhanced data acquisition features. Some data is stored using a blockchain technology approach. The blocks are generated using an edge computing device. The special Linux operating system version for this device implements a trusted execution environment (OP-TEE). The paper describes the architecture of the system, the hardware implementation, and the data acquisition and blockchain software for the critical data generated by the smart lysimeter system, at the edge computing level.