Smart Sensing for Agriculture: Applications, Advancements, and Challenges

Abstract

Smart sensing for agriculture (SSA) is an emerging paradigm to facilitate quantitative and qualitative improvement in the productions. It incorporates a large number of low cost and low energy consuming sensors for inducing automation and reducing human efforts. SSA not only increases the monetary benefits of farmers but also ensures the delivery of fresh products. SSA uses a variety of consumer electronics (CE) devices that can automate multiple processes, monitor the soil health, growth of the crops, animal husbandry, detect anomalies in crop growth or livestock health, and enhance agriculture product quality and volumes. These devices incorporate various short-range and long-range communication protocols for relaying the sensory data. SSA finds several applications and provides a futuristic perspective for developing efficient and economical CE devices. This encourages us to present a taxonomy of different applications and advancements in agriculture through smart sensing. We also discuss different challenges that we incur while developing CE devices for smart agriculture. © 2012 IEEE.