A Survey on the Role of IoT in Agriculture for the Implementation of Smart Farming

Internet of things (IoT) is a promising technology which provides efficient and reliable solutions towards the modernization of several domains. IoT based solutions are being developed to automatically maintain and monitor agricultural farms with minimal human involvement. The article presents many aspects of technologies involved in the domain of IoT in agriculture. It explains the major components of IoT based smart farming. A rigorous discussion on network technologies used in IoT based agriculture has been presented, that involves network architecture and layers, network topologies used, and protocols. Furthermore, the connection of IoT based agriculture systems with relevant technologies including cloud computing, big data storage and analytics has also been presented. In addition, security issues in IoT agriculture have been highlighted. A list of smart phone based and sensor based applications developed for different aspects of farm management has also been presented. Lastly, the regulations and policies made by several countries to standardize IoT based agriculture have been presented along with few available success stories. In the end, some open research issues and challenges in IoT agriculture field have been presented.