Remote management and control system for LED based plant factory using ZigBee and Internet

Recently, intelligent systems for agricultural production are being developed for safe and low cost food production. Plant factory provide high yield by growing multiple crops and making efficient use of land and resources. Plant growth is facilitated by maintaining humidity, temperature, CO₂ concentration and light intensity and these factors need to be monitored and maintained for an automated system. In this paper, we have proposed a control system for a LED based plant factory consisting of ZigBee wireless mesh network, and remote monitoring via Internet. Field sensors are installed for monitoring environmental conditions and power metering and ZigBee mesh network has been deployed for data acquisition from these sensors. ZigBee nodes transfer the field data to the coordinator node which also serves as a gateway node providing interoperability between TCP/IP network and ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). A major novelty of the system is the use of LED lighting instead of fluorescent lighting due to its low power consumption, long life and useful narrow band. LED lighting system provides an efficient and economical lighting system that facilitates plant growth by varying light intensity and frequency according to light conditions and growing requirements and also helps in reducing production costs and speeding growth. Prototype of the proposed system has been installed in a small part of greenhouse. Data acquisition and remote management of the system has shown very satisfactory performance.