Livestock Welfare by Means of an Edge Computing and IoT Platform.

The drop in the area of land available for agriculture and the growth of the population is creating more food demand and this makes farmers turn to the new technologies to increase or maintain the quantity and quality of agricultural products. Cloud computing has been playing an important role in the last decade. Unlike Cloud computing, Edge Computing handles the data generated by processing them at the network edge which allows for the implementation of services with shorter response times, a higher Quality of Service (QoS), increased security and low costs. In this paper, we present a platform which combines IoT, Edge Computing, Machine Learning and Blockchain techniques based on the Global Edge Computing Architecture to monitor the state of livestock in real-time, as well as ensure the traceability and sustainability of the different processes involved in the production. The platform is tested for its effectiveness comparing a traditional cloud-based architecture.