IoT architecture for urban agronomy and precision applications

In recent years, climate change, high population rates, water scarcity, contaminated farmland, eroding soils, and other factors, have raised serious concerns in the area of sustainable food production. In addition, it has been estimated that by 2050, as much as 80 percent of the earths population will reside in cities [1]. As a consequence, new forms of food production have been explored, especially in places close to or even within the consumption areas, that is, cities. In this context, cities are evolving into intelligent infrastructures in which the aim is to automate, optimize, and improve all possible aspects, including urban agriculture and precision agronomy. Despite recent research efforts, common grounds still have to be defined in terms of how to efficiently automate and provide intelligence to the urban agriculture implementations and integrate those in a transparent and scalable manner to the overall smart city solutions. For this, we believe that smart cities must be conceptualized and abstracted on a higher and different plane than the supporting information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure. However, the essential properties that make a city smart or a system of systems must be the architectural design assets of the underlying planes. This paper presents a conceptual IoT architecture for urban farming and precision agronomy in Smart Cities based on Software Defined Networks (SDNs) and Cyber-physical systems. Three layers comprise the proposed architecture.