Enabling AI in Agriculture 4.0: A Blockchain-Based Mobile CrowdSensing Architecture

Abstract

Agriculture 4.0 relies on extensive data for predictive services, necessitating effective data collection. Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS), with its cost-effectiveness and scalability, addresses this need but faces centralization limitations. Blockchain-based frameworks have been proposed to mitigate these issues but often focus solely on data collection, lacking a comprehensive end-to-end architecture for smart agriculture. Recent literature has explored the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, fog computing, and cloud computing capabilities to establish centralized end-to-end architectures. Nonetheless, these architectures come with their own set of centralized limitations. In the context of contemporary technologies, the integration of blockchain and digital twin (DT) holds the potential to revolutionize the field of smart agriculture. This paper introduces a holistic end-to-end, layered, and service-oriented architecture for Agriculture 4.0, integrating mobile crowdsensing, blockchain, and DT. Unlike existing architectures, this approach aims to overcome centralization limitations, leveraging the strengths of emerging technologies. The proposed architecture extends current capabilities for more efficient and secure Agriculture 4.0 practices. We deploy the suggested architecture onto the Ethereum blockchain, demonstrating its practicality through the obtained results.