# An IoT-Based Solution for Intelligent Farming +
## 5 Conclusions  
The IoT concept arose as a consequence of the exponentially increasing number of devices that are connected to the Internet. Nowadays, we can find IoT devices and applications in almost all sectors of the society. This wide range of applications, with distinct requirements and constraints, has led to the development of a plethora of protocols, standards and communication stacks, each one trying to solve specific requirements.  
The popularity of the Internet rendered IP-based protocols to be the most popular ones. However, despite the efforts made to reduce the impact of the overhead associated with those solutions, as it happens with the 6 LoWPAN AL, such solutions are still unsuitable for several energy constrained IoT applications. A practical example is addressed in the scope of the SheepIT project.  
Using SheepIT's requirements as a starting point, an IoT-based stack for intelligent farming solutions is proposed, from the Physical to the Application Layer levels. The overall system architecture includes a WSN, with a set of mobiles nodes, a set of static nodes, a gateway and a computational platform. Previous works addressed essentially the WSN domain, namely devices and communication mechanisms. In the scope of this paper, the gateway node was presented, being the functional modules highlighted. Furthermore, to evaluate the feasibility of its implementation, the duration of their processing tasks was evaluated for a number of different devices' data. The results show that the gateway is able to transmit all the data gathered within the duration of an MC, even considering the worst case measurements and the use of low-cost and low-power hardware.  
Future work shall include a similar evaluation on a 2G, 3G and 4G connection between the gateway and the Internet. We expect a significant increase in the latency when publishing the data into the broker, particularly due to the lower bandwidth of such a solution as well as its lower reliability. In addition, the impact of the local services shall be evaluated.  
Additionally, and regarding the proposed stack, a more detailed analysis shall be performed to the modules of the Transportation Layer not addressed in the scope of this paper. Specifically, the routing manager and the security manager modules shall be detailed and evaluated. Finally, all the M2M components shall be subject to intensive experiments under real deploying conditions.  
[PERSON] wrote the paper and participated in the design and implementation of the solution. [PERSON] and [PERSON] contributed to the design of the solution and reviewed the paper. [PERSON] was part of the implementation team and participated in the design of the experiments.  
This work is funded by FCT/MEC through national funds and when applicable co-funded by FEDER--PT2020 partnership agreement under the project UID/EEA/50008/2019.  
**Acknowledgments:** We would like to thank Agrarian School of Viseu (ESAV-IPV) and Ramos Pintos, Lda., for all the support and expertise shared concerning the livestock and wine-growing domains, crucial for defining the presented IoT architecture.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results.