@INPROCEEDINGS{Ahme2311:SoftFarmNet,
AUTHOR="Nurzaman Ahmed and Flavio Esposito and Okwudilichukwu Okafor and Nadia
Shakoor",
TITLE="{SoftFarmNet:} Reconfigurable {Wi-Fi} {HaLow} Networks for Precision
Agriculture",
BOOKTITLE="2023 IEEE 12th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet)
(CloudNet2023)",
ADDRESS="Hoboken, USA",
PAGES="8.97",
DAYS=1,
MONTH=nov,
YEAR=2023,
KEYWORDS="Internet of Things; Internet of Agricultural Things; Wi-Fi Halow;
Software-Defined Networking; Quality of Service",
ABSTRACT="Networks deployed for Internet of Agricultural Things (IoAT) applications
are often deployed in remote areas with limited coverage and a lack of
standardization across sensing devices, posing challenges to reliable
connectivity and resilient data exchange. The IEEE 802.11ah standard,
commonly known as Wi-Fi HaLow, offers the potential for wide coverage and
support for a large number of IoAT devices. However, such protocol still
faces efficiency suboptimalities in channel utilization, particularly when
handling heterogeneous IoT applications with diverse Quality of Service
(QoS) requirements. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose
{\it SoftFarmNet}, a reconfigurable IEEE 802.11ah (Wi-Fi HaLow) network
management architecture, specifically designed for remote monitoring and
control of agricultural-based IoAT. SoftFarmNet leverages a network traffic
prediction-based slot scheduling and station grouping scheme to enhance
channel utilization and support different QoS requirements of IoAT
applications. The proposed architecture integrates Software-defined
Networking (SDN) at the edge, enabling configuration of low-level Wi-Fi
HaLow parameters and the management of multiple network slices to
dynamically meet application requirements. Our performance evaluation
demonstrates substantial improvements in throughput, delay, and energy
consumption, effectively optimizing channel usage, with respect to
state-of-the-art solutions."
}