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# Research on 3G Terminal-Based Agricultural Information Service

Nengfu Xie, Xuefu Zhang

► To cite this version:

Nengfu Xie, Xuefu Zhang. Research on 3G Terminal-Based Agricultural Information Service. 7th International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA), Sep 2013, Beijing, China. pp.152-157, 10.1007/978-3-642-54341-8_16 . hal-01220824

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Submitted on 27 Oct 2015

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research on 3G Terminal -based Agricultural
Information Service

Nengfu Xie, Xuefu Zhang

Agricultural Information Institute, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences Key
Laboratory of Digital Agricultural Early-warning Technology, Ministry of Agriculture,
Beijing 100081, P. R. China
{xienengfu, zhangxuefu} @caas.cn

**Abstract.** In order to solve the farmer's agricultural production information' acquisition problems with a 3G terminal, a 3G-terminial agricultural information service system method is proposed in the paper. With the advent of 3G and WLAN technologies, the rural and urban areas in which 3G coverage is complemented by WLAN deployments is becoming available. The agricultural information services limited by network bandwidth and geography will be changed completely. In the paper, we will propose an architecture of the 3G- terminal agricultural information service. First, we present the design and implement of the GAIS architecture for mobile multimedia information service. Then the agricultural content-based information services are described in detail. Finally, we present a prototype agricultural information service to show our experiment for the agricultural information service in a mobile information context.

**Keywords:** 3G terminal; service design; agricultural information; push technology

# 1 Introduction

With the urgent demand of agricultural information for farmers and quick
development of telecommunication industry in china, the convenience, quickness and
validity of agricultural information service are becoming more important [1]. The
mobile phone has been described as the most likely modern digital device to support
economic development in developing nations [5, 7]. Tapan presented CAM - a
framework for developing and deploying mobile applications in the rural developing
world. Supporting minimal, paper-based navigation, a simple scripted programming
model and offline multimedia interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural user,
application and infrastructure constraints [3, 4]. The shortage of agri cultural
information, poor telecommunication networks and uncoordinated information
resources are crucial problems facing agricultural information sources in china. The
3G technology will enable a wide range of services and applications in rural areas
with support of multimedia and positioning, which will bring novel applications with
high impact for the farmers. Combined with modern web and data management
technologies application in agricultural domain can bring new agricultural
applications and services for agricultural production. The mobile phone is no longer
just an audio communication tool but capable of providing additional integrated
functions. The various features of mobile phone, which make it versatile, are SMS,
MMS, GPRS [2].

The advent of 3G and WLAN technologies in the recent years open a way for sign language based services in mobile and wireless settings, which bring the applications and services come on stream. Third generation mobile network (3G) is the latest advancement in the field of mobile technology. Providing high bandwidth communication of 8kbit/s-2Mbit/s and a revolutionary introduction of multimedia services over mobile communication, it aims to make mobile devices into versatile mobile user terminals[8]. TD-CDMA (Time Division CDMA) wireless technology in china can meet the rapidly growing demand for mobile broadband services in agricultural information systems. The mobile information services will make it easier and quicker to provide agricultural information services in today's more complex web environment.

The agricultural information services limited by network bandwidth and geography will be changed completely with the 3G network coverage to rural area, which will help solve the problem of “last kilometer” in agricultural informationization. In the paper, we will develop an agricultural information system, which can gather, manage agricultural multimedia information resources, and push certain agricultural production technology information to the customized terminals.

The paper is structured into four main sections. Section 2 presents the terminal - based agricultural information service architecture, which provides a software framework that aims to describe our need and the main components. In section 3, the GAIS-based prototype system is presented and describes the agricultural content- based information services in detail. Finally, Section 5 provides some conclusions and summary remarks.

## 2 The GAIS Architecture Design

The terminal -based agricultural information service (GAIS) architecture is the framework and soul of the agriculture information system deciding the system functions and information service. As showed in Fig. 1, the GAIS architecture is composed of our logic tires from the terminal client side to the server side: 3G terminal tier, portal service tier, 3G network tier and service center tier. At the fat server side, we provide an environment that integrates related different agricultural information sources into the agricultural information center. The source can be deleted, added and indexed diametrically. The center will also provide Update Tool guarantees that all data are always up to- date, manage the 3G terminal configure, and present enriched content on 3G terminals with limited user interface i.e. small screens and simple keyboards.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. The GAIS Architecture</figcaption></figure>

## 2.1 Agricultural Information Service Center Tier

The service center tier manages and stores the agricultural information of the whole system, and decides the information exchange between the 3G terminal and service center according to the setting of the terminal in the system.

The administration content module is designed for the data adding deleting and querying in agricultural information center. It will control the data quality of different databases, data service, and data clustering. The metadata management will help users find the information they required easily. The information meta-data is building an object-oriented repository technology that is integrated with agricultural meta data management that process metadata, which will provide a united category that organize the information in information center, and a standard of the information's store, and support exchange of model data. The metadata-based information service will provide a united interface for users to access the information by metadata-based information category. The information distribution is about assuring that the right agricultural information is available to the right agricultural users. In order to distribute the information to the users timely, we will build 3G-based information distribution service, by which the information will be accessed with the 3G terminals. In the means, the information distribution will help the communication between the users and the information center.

## 2.2 3G Network tier

In the near future, wireless networks will appear with greater ubiquity, from public access networks offering connectivity in agricultural information services, to telecoms
operated 3G and 4G networks, especially TD-SCDMA network into rural areas in
china, which allows 9 hundred million of farmers access to services as important and
varied as information acquisition, health care, education, and financial and
governmental services. The 3G network tier is mainly implementing the information
exchange the 3G terminal and data server in TD-SCDMA network. Indeed our
simulations are based on the following two assumptions: 1) full TD-SCDMA
network coverage to rural area; 2) TD-SCDMA link always on, which we argue that
are realistic assumptions in typical scenarios.

## 2.3 Portal Service Tier

The portal service tire contains a group service functions for the terminal, which can
customized its necessary function, such as multimedia browsing, upload/download,
multimedia controller, present management, message interaction and message
interaction. The portal service tire can optimize the communication process and may
offer mobile service enhancements, such as location, privacy, and presence based
services. It communicates with the Web Server using the standard Internet protocols
such as HTTP/HTTPS.

## 2.4 3G Terminal Tier

The mobile terminals must be seen as complex microelectronics assemblies that are
attached to sophisticated network-based system. The 3G terminal tier is a carrier of
the client of 3G-based Mobile agricultural information service. The client can store
the information coming from the service center for offline browsing, and contain a
microbrowser that the GUI and is analogous to a standard Web browser, which can
accept the request agricultural information and send message to the service center that
makes a plan, and pushes the information to the users' 3G mobile terminal by 3G
network.

# 3 GAIS-based Prototype System

Based on GAIS hierarchy and the actual needs of the project, the entire system is
divided into two parts: service centers subsystem and mobile terminal subsystem,
which constitute a service whole. The service center's functions contain: 1) It manages
all the registered 3G terminals and gives orders for pushing information and
emergence notification to the terminals; 2) It can put the 3G terminals into different
groups according to the region to ensure that the pushed information and emergence
notification is closely related with the farmers' requirements; 3) The service center
manages the agricultural information and provides real-time dynamic information to
the client-side. And it receives the request and processes it then return the result. The
service center operation interface is showed in the Fig. 2. The mobile terminal
subsystem is mainly used to store the information pushed by the service center, and
browses video on demand. The mobile terminal subsystem can also send technology
questions using text and picture to the server, and accept the result. The service center
operation interface is showed in the Fig. 3.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>(a) The service center portal interface</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>(b) The mobile terminal operation interface

**Fig. 2.** The system interface based on GAIS hierarchy</figcaption></figure>

The first applications testing wireless accesses was implemented for agricultural
information provided by central information center, such as agricultural production
technology, pest warning, Agricultural science and technology popularization, and
farm product price, etc. The application have been supported by Special Project on of
The National Department of Science and Technology "TD-SCDMA based application
development and demonstration validation in agriculture informationization”, which
got very good effect to solve the problem of "last kilometer" in Chinese rural.

4 Conclusion

In the paper, we have proposed an architecture of the 3G-terminial agricultural
information service, which is the key and core of 3G-based information service
system. In the paper, we also discussed how to push agricultural the information to
the farmers and how the farmers get the agricultural production needs' technologies
by communication with the system. And a prototype system is designed and
developed based on the GAIS architecture which is composed of four logic tiers. The
prototype system can push the information to the 3G terminal for the farmer' demands
and the 3G terminal can also communicate with the system for getting the agricultural
expert answer by asking questions, which proves that the architecture is feasible. In
the future, we will make further study on the terminal information service
development and the system demonstration.

Acknowledgments

The work is supported by the National Science and Technology Support Program (No.2011BAH10B01) and the special fund project for The CAAS scientific and technological fund project “Research on 3G information terminal-based rural multimedia information service” (No.201219).

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