Ambient IoT: Communications Enabling Precision Agriculture

TL;DR

This paper reviews how Ambient IoT, utilizing energy-harvesting devices, can enhance precision agriculture by providing low-cost, battery-free communication solutions, addressing key challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive review of A-IoT applications in precision agriculture, comparing energy sources and outlining research challenges and opportunities.

Findings

A-IoT enables low-cost, battery-free communication in agriculture.

Comparison of A-IoT with other ambient energy technologies.

Identification of key research challenges and future directions.

Abstract

One of the most intriguing 6G vertical markets is precision agriculture, where communications, sensing, control, and robotics technologies are used to improve agricultural outputs and decrease environmental impact. Ambient IoT (A-IoT), which uses a network of devices that harvest ambient energy to enable communications, is expected to play an important role in agricultural use cases due to its low costs, simplicity, and battery-free (or battery-assisted) operation. In this paper, we review the use cases of precision agriculture and discuss the challenges. We discuss how A-IoT can be used for precision agriculture and compare it with other ambient energy source technologies. We also discuss research directions related to both A-IoT and precision agriculture.