Lightweight AES based Secure Communication Framework for Smart Agriculture IoT using ESP8266

Abstract

Smart agriculture is built on the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor environmental conditions like temperature and humidity in real-time. Nevertheless, these low resource demanding gadgets are susceptible to security risks because of the low computational and memory capacities. The paper presents a lightweight encrypted communication system on ESP8266 platform that is based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to be used in smart farming. The system consists of a temperature and humidity sensor (the DHT11 sensor) and sends encrypted information to a cloud server over the MQTT protocol. An optimized key scheduling and reduced memory consumption make a lightweight variant of AES-128 which is adaptable to a limited IoT setup. The suggested model is tested both on a simulation and on a real-time hardware. Performance measurements are made in terms of encryption latency, memory usage, and power consumption and compared to standard AES. Findings show that the execution time and memory consumption were reduced by 28 and 22 percent respectively in comparison to the original scenario, yet strong security was ensured. The suggested framework guarantees that smart agriculture systems are efficiently, safely, and scalably communicated, and it is therefore very applicable in real-life applications.