Efficient Data Management in Agricultural IoT: Compression, Security, and MQTT Protocol Analysis

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology into agriculture has revolutionized farming practices by using connected devices and sensors to optimize processes and facilitate sustainable execution. Because most IoT devices have limited resources, the vital requirement to efficiently manage data traffic while ensuring data security in agricultural IoT solutions creates several challenges. Therefore, it is important to study the data amount that IoT protocols generate for resource-constrained devices, as it has a direct impact on the device performance and overall usability of the IoT solution. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study that focuses on optimizing data transmission in agricultural IoT solutions with the use of compression algorithms and secure technologies. Through experimentation and analysis, we evaluate different approaches to minimize data traffic while protecting sensitive agricultural data. Our results highlight the effectiveness of compression algorithms, especially Huffman coding, in reducing data size and optimizing resource usage. In addition, the integration of encryption techniques, such as AES, provides the security of the transmitted data without incurring significant overhead. By assessing different communication scenarios, we identify the most efficient approach, a combination of Huffman encoding and AES encryption, to strike a balance between data security and transmission efficiency.