Development of integrated network platform for heterogeneous agricultural information remote monitoring terminal

Abstract: Because of lack of agriculture informatization standard in Chinese agricultural wireless monitoring, variability of monitoring terminals and weak compatibility of monitoring system data structure, this research focused on standard design and management of heterogeneous data and developed integrated network platform for heterogeneous agricultural information remote monitoring systems. The establishment of integrated network platform was mainly on account of the following points. Firstly, communication protocol for collected data was carried out to standardize data formats of different monitoring terminals in view of data characteristics of heterogeneous network. Secondly, standardized data management interface was set up based on XML (extensible markup language) and VB (Visual Basic) 6.0. could parse data and store data from different monitoring terminals according to standard format of communication protocol. Thirdly, remote-monitoring platform was designed and built on the basis of PHP (hypertext preprocessor) language, MySQL (microsoft structure quest language) database, as well as server and website technology. Monitoring system consists of 3 parts: information monitoring terminals, data interface and network platform. Information monitoring terminals collect information of sensors and process original data preliminarily. In the meantime, monitoring terminals are supposed to integrate data according to communication protocol and send data to server. Data management interface is the core of concentrated processing of monitoring data and heterogeneous network data interaction. It is the bridge between monitoring terminals and server database and is tied to communication server. Moreover, its main task is to parse data and transform data by formulas from XML file. Network platform is used to display data and import some setting information. It is a connection channel between monitoring system and clients. Field test was conducted in Yanqing County, Beijing on May 18th, 2016. The test utilized trench depth and position during operation of trencher as monitoring targets. The purpose of test is to verify whether the accuracy of collected data and real-time capacity of data transmission can meet the requirement. In the field test, monitoring terminal collected original data from sensors and integrated data according to the standard format of communication protocol after preliminary treatment. Angle difference and longitude and latitude data were taken as channel data and sent to server interface. Angle difference was channel data monitored, whereas data that needed to be displayed was trench depth. As a result, angle difference needed to be transformed to trench depth by their correlation. The correlation was written to XML file in the form of formula. Data management interface parsed data, calculated trench depth through the formula and stored processed channel data to corresponding sheet in MySQL database. Network platform could invoke trench depth, longitude and latitude in the database. Trench depth could be displayed by means of graphs and tables and from graphs and tables it could be exported to Excel. Longitude and latitude were used to track trencher from platform. The test showed that data management interface could receive and parse data from monitoring terminal in real time, platform could display monitoring data accurately and position track was precise. We can conclude that this research solves problems on heterogeneous network and terminal hardware difference of monitoring system and realizes remote real-time monitoring and remote control of agricultural machinery information.