Internet of Things in agriculture, recent advances and future challenges

The increasing demand for food, both in terms of quantity and quality, has raised the need for intensification and industrialisation of the agricultural sector. The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is a highly promising family of technologies which is capable of offering many solutions towards the modernisation of agriculture. Scientific groups and research institutions, as well as the industry, are in a race trying to deliver more and more IoT products to the agricultural business stakeholders, and, eventually, lay the foundations to have a clear role when IoT becomes a mainstream technology. At the same time Cloud Computing, which is already very popular, and Fog Computing provide sufficient resources and solutions to sustain, store and analyse the huge amounts of data generated by IoT devices. The management and analysis of IoT data (“Big Data”) can be used to automate processes, predict situations and improve many activities, even in real-time. Moreover, the concept of interoperability among heterogeneous devices inspired the creation of the appropriate tools, with which new applications and services can be created and give an added value to the data flows produced at the edge of the network. The agricultural sector was highly affected by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies and is expected to be equally benefited by the IoT. In this article, a survey of recent IoT technologies, their current penetration in the agricultural sector, their potential value for future farmers and the challenges that IoT faces towards its propagation is presented.