A Revolutionary Rural Agricultural Participatory Sensing Approach Using Delay Tolerant Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Delay Tolerant Network-based model using mobile relays and device-to-device communication to provide timely agro-advisory services to farmers in regions with poor or no network connectivity.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel DTN relay application model that enables end-to-end communication for agro-services in connectivity-challenged rural areas using mobile relays and D2D communication.

Findings

Effective communication in poor network zones achieved

Model successfully tested with tea farmers in West Bengal and Assam

Potential for extension to other rural applications

Abstract

To provide sustainable digital agro-advisory services to farmers, seamless flow of information from the farmers to the experts/expert systems, and vice versa is required. The query generated by the farmers, which may contain multimedia data regarding disease or pest attack in the crops is required to be transmitted to the experts for analysis. Further, after analyzing the query, an alert or advice from the expert system is required to be communicated back to the farmers within some tolerable delay. However, in a country like India, network connectivity is extremely poor in several agricultural regions which makes the end-to-end connectivity between the farmers and the expert system intermittent. Therefore, providing agro-advisory services to farmers in a reasonable time becomes a challenge. In this paper, we propose a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) based relay application model which enables agro-advisory services to farmers located in \emph{No-network} or \emph{Poor-network} zones. In the proposed model, end-to-end communication has been enabled with the help of Device to Device (D2D) communication and by introducing mobile relay nodes which can carry the queries (responses), from (to) the poor or no network zones to (from) the zones where communication is possible. Implementation of this model has been presented for the tea farmers of West Bengal and Assam, which can be extended for various other applications in future.