SoftFarmNet: Reconfigurable Wi-Fi HaLow Networks for Precision Agriculture

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 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.