Internet of Things for Agricultural Applications: The State-of-the-art

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) inspired various new and enhanced sets of applications in multiple domains including agriculture. The recent drive in the adoption of IoT technologies offers a major enhancement for the agricultural sectors in terms of efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we investigate the specific issues and challenges associated with IoT, and review various IoT architectures, communication, middleware, and information processing technologies. We, then, discuss few IoT applications for agriculture – presenting various case studies to thoroughly analyze the solutions along with their design and implementation related parameters. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive review of the available simulation tools, datasets, and testbeds which provisions experimentation with IoT in agriculture. We enumerate open issues and challenges present in enabling IoT for agriculture. Finally, the paper concludes while giving directions for future research.