MobiCrop: Supporting crop farmers with a cloud-enabled mobile app

Mobile technology is increasingly being adopted in the agricultural space as a measure to assist farmers in decision. In this regard, the MobiCrop project was initiated by the researchers from the College of Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and the Multi-Agent Distributed Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (MADMUC) Lab. The aim of the project is to enable farmers to have mobile access to up to date information on pesticides and further make decisions on which pesticides to apply, how to apply them, when to apply them, and so on. Due to its complexity, MobiCrop is designed as a mobile distributed system that follows a three-layered deployment; comprising of mobile nodes, a cloud-hosted middleware, and a cloud-hosted database server. Since the data that is being pushed to the mobile is resident on the database server, caching methodology on the mobile has been proposed to support offline accessibility of pesticide information. However, there are challenges that arise due to the intermittent loss of connectivity which leads to stale data on the mobile. In this work, we have adapted the dual caching technique where we store data on the mobile and on the middleware. The approach makes the MobiCrop architecture now robust and reliable for offline data accessibility.