Web Services Mobile Application for Geographically Dispersed Crop Farmers

This paper presents a mobile application called MobiCrop that aids crop farmers in the application of pesticides. The requirement of the application is to have a monitoring station where updates are constantly being pushed to the farmers who are geographically dispersed. This requirement creates the need to deploy a mobile distributed architecture rather than a standalone app that has become the standard for most existing applications in today´s mobile economy. We proposed a three-tier architecture that consists of mobile devices, a cloud-hosted middleware, and cloud storage where the pesticide data which we model as Web services are stored. The proposal of the middleware is to reduce the chances of overloading the mobile nodes with data as well as managing the bandwidth of the wireless network efficiently. This is achieved by introducing policy-based content delivery of data which necessitates that a farmer receives only the information that is of interest to him/her rather than flooding the farmer´s device with all the voluminous back-end data. The preliminary evaluation of the proposed system shows high performance boost especially with the content management and cache control, as well as the reduction of data across the bandwidth.