A Comparative Study of Wireless Communication Protocols for use in Smart Farming Framework Development

Over the last few years, the design and development of smart agriculture systems have been an important and emerging concept. Through various smart farming approaches, better crop yield can be achieved and output can be enhanced as well. Internet of things is an emerging concept that gives smart solutions for the implementation of various applications. Integration of IoT with WSN gives a cost-effective solution for increased productivity. IoT-enabled smart farming is a very efficient approach when compared with conventional techniques and methods IoT-WSN-based solutions are being used to monitor agricultural land with minimal human involvement. Many existing wireless protocols are already available, such as Wi-Fi, LoRa WAN, Wi-MAX, LR-WPAN, BLE (Bluetooth low energy), RFID, MQTT, Zigbee and Sigfox etc. This paper gives a review study of the comparison of existing wireless protocols and their effect on the IoT-WSN-enabled implementation of smart farming. It describes the primary components of the smart farming IoT-WSN model. It shows various features of different technologies implied in the IoT-based farming techniques. A rigorous analysis of existing wireless protocols used in IoT-WSN based smart farming has been presented and a detailed view of the role of relevant technologies and present protocols in smart farming is discussed in this paper. The Paper describes the representation of the basic energy consumption states for LoRa WAN, Zigbee, Sigfox, and NB-IoT end-device. This paper highlights the impact of energy-efficient LoRa WAN technology and the proposed WSN-IoT model for implementation.