Despite the perception people may have regarding the agricultural process, the reality is that today’s agriculture industry is data-centered, precise, and smarter than ever. The rapid emergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) based technologies redesigned almost every industry including “smart agriculture” which moved the industry from statistical to quantitative approaches. Such revolutionary changes are shaking the existing agriculture methods and creating new opportunities along a range of challenges. This article highlights the potential of wireless sensors and IoT in agriculture, as well as the challenges expected to be faced when integrating this technology with the traditional farming practices. IoT devices and communication techniques associated with wireless sensors encountered in agriculture applications are analyzed in detail. What sensors are available for specific agriculture application, like soil preparation, crop status, irrigation, insect and pest detection are listed. How this technology helping the growers throughout the crop stages, from sowing until harvesting, packing and transportation is explained. Furthermore, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for crop surveillance and other favorable applications such as optimizing crop yield is considered in this article. State-of-the-art IoT-based architectures and platforms used in agriculture are also highlighted wherever suitable. Finally, based on this thorough review, we identify current and future trends of IoT in agriculture and highlight potential research challenges.

Advances in wireless communication are forging new possibilities for sensors. New sensors are equipping major systems around us with unparalleled intelligence as in the case of smart grids, smart homes, and driverless vehicles. Considering the current developments in the field of sensor networks, one feels that it has reached an interesting stage, where the role of the sensors becoming crucial in numerous applications. This all speaks volumes of the fact that sensors are going to be at the front and center of most of future technologies, needless to say the Internet of Things. Considering their vital role from futuristic perspective this survey reports variety of sensors along with their characteristics and applications, which impact human life and well-being. In addition, this survey considers recent prototypes, leading sensor manufacturers as well as major projects that have made use of sensors since the last decade. Moreover, significance of this effort is that integration possibilities of sensors with other networks and major technologies are discussed, while possible challenges and key benefits are highlighted. This research effort focuses the latest developments in the area of sensors and sensor networks as research gears up to meet the challenges of the emerging technologies and their applications particularly those that emphasize smart sensors.

Providing an efficient communication for the underwater wireless sensor networks is a significant problem due to the unique characteristics of such environments. Radio signal cannot propagate well in deep water, and we have to replace this with the acoustic channel. This replacement results in many issues like high latency due to less propagation speeds, low bandwidths and high error probability. In addition, new features like node mobility with water currents and 3-dimensional space brings additional challenges to the underwater sensor network (UWSN) protocol design. Many routing protocols have been proposed for such environments but most of them considered that the complete dimensional location of all the sensor nodes is already known through a localization process, which itself is a challenging task in UWSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol, called Hop-by-Hop Dynamic Addressing Based (H2-DAB), in order to provide scalable and time efficient routing. Our routing protocol will take advantage of the multiple-sink architecture of the underwater wireless sensor networks. The novelty of H2-DAB is that, it does not require any dimensional location information, or any extra specialized hardware compared to many other routing protocols in the same area. Our results show that H2-DAB effectively achieves the goals of higher data deliveries with optimal delays and energy consumptions.