Secure Irrigation System for Olive Orchards Using Internet of Things

Smart irrigation system, also referred as precision irrigation system, is an attractive solution to save the limited water resources as well as to improve crop productivity and quality. In this work, by using Internet of things (IoT), we aim to design a smart irrigation system for olive groves. In such IoT system, a huge number of low-power and low-complexity devices (sensors, actuators) are interconnected. Thus, a great challenge is to satisfy the increasing demands in terms of spectral efficiency. Moreover, securing the IoT system is also a critical challenge, since several types of cybersecurity threats may pose. In this paper, we address these issues through the application of the massive multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) technology. Indeed, M-MIMO is a key technology of the fifth generation (5G) networks and has the potential to improve spectral efficiency as well as the physical layer security. Specifically, by exploiting the available M-MIMO channel degrees of freedom, we propose a physical layer security scheme based on artificial noise (AN) to prevent eavesdropping. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms traditional ones in terms of spectral efficiency and secrecy rate.