AgriFusion: An Architecture for IoT and Emerging Technologies Based on a Precision Agriculture Survey

Precision Agriculture (PA) is a management strategy that utilizes communication and information technology for farm management. It is a key to improve productivity by using the best agricultural practices and optimal usage of resources. Agriculture faces diverse challenges due to soil degradation, climate variation, and increasing costs. To unfold these challenges, PA uses Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) and exploits acquisition, communication, and processing of the data as basic enabling technologies to amplify the crop yield. Also, many other multidisciplinary technologies are supporting PA in finding the most novel use cases for PA. The use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed PA at almost every level. The fog/edge paradigm is mitigating many challenges such as network bandwidth and security by bringing computation closer to the deployed network. At the same time, Software Defined Networks (SDN) brings flexibility, big data assists in handling data, and nanotechnology plays a crucial part in driving the innovation in PA. This paper delves into ways these technologies are transforming PA in respective tracks, exhibiting the significance of integrating multidisciplinary approaches towards the future of PA. In addition to a comprehensive survey, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary architecture: AgriFusion, for efficient and cost-effective agriculture solutions. A list of industrial solutions for different aspects of farm management and their underlying focused technology have been highlighted. This can help to align research and industrial goals for PA. Furthermore, this paper defines a step approach to describe the performance dichotomy between resource availability and objectives for PA. In addition, solution architecture is proposed for designing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in PA. In the end, some open research issues in implementing PA and respective future scopes have been presented.