The potential of remote monitoring and control of protected crop production environment using mobile phone under 3G and Wi-Fi communication conditions

Protected production of crops such as vegetables, flowers, and fruits has been more popular in many countries. To secure stable productivity and profitability, continuous and intensive monitoring and control of protected crop production environment is critical, which is labor- and time-consuming. Failure to maintain proper environmental conditions (e.g., light, temperature, humidity) leads to significant damage to crop growth and quality; therefore, farmers should visit or be present close to the production area. To overcome these problems, application of remote monitoring and control of crop production environment has been increasing, and mobile phones have recently been used to utilize message and remote access services. Levels of technology adoption are different for farmers' needs for their cropping systems. In this paper, the potential of wireless remote monitoring and control of protected agricultural environment using mobile phones were evaluated under 3G and Wi-Fi communication conditions. Two services of monitoring and control of protected crop production were implemented and evaluated: short message service and remote access service. For the short message service, data transmission time under 3G was affected by communication path, but not significantly affected by signal intensity level. For the remote access service, data communication speeds were affected by signal intensity, location, time of day (i.e., the number of users), and moving speed. For 3 G communication, data download and upload speeds decreased as signal intensity level became lower. For Wi-Fi communication, effects of location, signal intensity, and communication direction on the data transmission speeds were statistically significant (α = 0.05) in most of the cases. The effects of time of day were not clear for both 3G and Wi-Fi conditions, but data download speed was significantly (α = 0.05) affected by moving speed (0 and 100 km/h). When the remote access service was applied for greenhouse environment control (e.g., window motor activation), remote access and control were successfully achieved within 13.74 s and 1.08 s, respectively, regardless of signal intensity, location, and moving speed within the tested conditions. Although the results of the study may vary at different communication conditions (e.g., different service provider), overall trends would be still valid and provide useful guidelines to farmers for application of remote monitoring and control using mobile phones.