To reach the goal of sustainable agriculture, smart farming is taking advantage of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. These smart farms are designed to be run by interconnected devices and vehicles. Some enormous potentials can be achieved by the integration of different IoT technologies to achieve automated operations with minimum supervision. This paper outlines some major applications of IoT and UAV in smart farming, explores the communication technologies, network functionalities and connectivity requirements for Smart farming. The connectivity limitations of smart agriculture and it’s solutions are analysed with two case studies. In case study-1, we propose and evaluate meshed Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) gateways to address connectivity limitations of Smart Farming. While in case study-2, we explore satellite communication systems to provide connectivity to smart farms in remote areas of Australia. Finally, we conclude the paper by identifying future research challenges on this topic and outlining directions to address those challenges.

Recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have made them able to communicate and collaborate, forming flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). FANETs are becoming popular in many application domains, including precision agriculture, goods delivery, construction, environment and climate monitoring, and military surveillance. These interesting new avenues for the use of UAVs are motivating researchers to rethink the existing research on FANETs. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive and thorough review of the different types of UAVs used in FANETs, their mobility models, main characteristics, and applications, as well as the routing protocols used in this type of network. Other important contributions of this paper include the investigation of emerging technologies integrated with FANETs.