The increasing food scarcity necessitates sustainable agriculture achieved through automation to meet the growing demand. Integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is crucial in enhancing food production across various agricultural domains, encompassing irrigation, soil moisture monitoring, fertilizer optimization and control, early-stage pest and crop disease management, and energy conservation. Wireless application protocols such as ZigBee, WiFi, SigFox, and LoRaWAN are commonly employed to collect real-time data for monitoring purposes. Embracing advanced technology is imperative to ensure efficient annual production. Therefore, this study emphasizes a comprehensive, future-oriented approach, delving into IoT-WSNs, wireless network protocols, and their applications in agriculture since 2019. It thoroughly discusses the overview of IoT and WSNs, encompassing their architectures and summarization of network protocols. Furthermore, the study addresses recent issues and challenges related to IoT-WSNs and proposes mitigation strategies. It provides clear recommendations for the future, emphasizing the integration of advanced technology aiming to contribute to the future development of smart agriculture systems.

Communication at terahertz (THz) frequencies has emerged as a potential answer to the challenge of providing massive capacity and ultra-high data speeds for 6G wireless networks. However, THz waves are vulnerable to obstruction because of their attenuation during propagation and poor diffraction. The development of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) technology has shown promise in addressing these issues. The RIS enables the development of smart radio settings with enhanced spectrum coverage and efficiency by regulating the phase shifts of passively reflecting elements. Amidst the vast potential of RIS-based THz communication, a noticeable void exists in comprehensive research, calling for a systematic survey to shed light on its principles, use cases, performance evaluation, challenges, and future trajectories. This review investigates the exciting field of RIS-based THz communication in fifth-generation (B5G), sixth-generation (6G), and beyond. Our study provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging technology, covering a variety of use cases, including CE, coverage, security, sum rate, and energy efficiency. We also investigate resource allocation strategies for THz communication using RIS. Additionally, the performance of RIS-based THz systems with multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and massive MIMO and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies is analyzed. By analyzing the existing literature, we illuminate the various approaches, methodologies, and future developments in this field. We also emphasize open issues and research opportunities in THz communication based on RIS. This survey is a valuable resource, contributing to understanding the emerging paradigms and research frontiers of RIS-based THz communication.

This article gives a discussion on impulse noise, its models and how it affects communications systems. We discuss the different impulse noise models in the literature, looking at their similarities and differences in communications systems. The impulse noise models discussed are memoryless (Middleton Class A and Bernoulli-Gaussian), and with memory (Markov- Middleton and Markov-Gaussian). We then go further to give performance comparisons in terms of bit error rates for some of the variants of impulse noise models. We also compare the bit error rate performance of single-carrier (SC) and multi-carrier (MC) communications systems operating under impulse noise. It can be seen that MC is not always better than SC under impulse noise. Lastly, the known impulse noise mitigation schemes (clipping/nulling using thresholds, iterative based and error control coding methods) are discussed.

In this paper, we explain the design and implementation of an intelligent irrigation control system based on fuzzy logic for the automatic control of water pumps used in farms and greenhouses. This system enables its user to save water and electricity and prevent over-watering and under-watering of the crop by taking into account the climatic parameters and soil moisture. The irrigation system works without human intervention. The climate sensors are packaged using electronic circuits, and the whole is interfaced with an Arduino and a Simulink model. These sensors provide information that is used by the Simulink model to control the water pump speed; the speed of the water pump is controlled to increase or decrease the amount of water that needs to be pushed by the pump. The Simulink model contains the fuzzy control logic that manages the data read by the Arduino through sensors and sends the command to change the pump speed to the Arduino by considering all the sensor data. The need for human intervention is eliminated by using this system and a more successful crop is produced by supplying the right amount of water to the crop when it is needed. The water supply is stopped when a sufficient amount of moisture is present in the soil and it is started as soon as the soil moisture levels drops below certain levels, depending upon the environmental factors.

The concept of the peer-to-peer local energy market (P2P LEM) is no longer novel to the energy community. Yet, its large-scale implementation within the current electricity network remains a complex challenge. One key reason is the lack of understanding of the supplier licensing models in different countries. For instance, in the UK, up to year 2023, a consumer is only allowed to have a single supplier at a time under its single licence supplier model. This directly contradicts the existing P2P trading models that allow a consumer to purchase electricity from multiple sellers within the local market. Given this context, this article conducts a review of recent literature and government policies in different countries on the P2P LEM and identifies the barriers behind the lack of large-scale P2P trading implementation in today’s electricity markets. We explain how these barriers can be overcome by engaging prosumers in traditional and private distribution networks through either licensed or license-exempt suppliers. Particularly, we discuss six P2P LEM frameworks that can be utilised to address the supplier licensing issue. Finally, this review presents a summary of risks, and recommendations to aid the regulatory framework to implement P2P LEM.