Water management is paramount in countries with water scarcity. This also affects agriculture, as a large amount of water is dedicated to that use. The possible consequences of global warming lead to the consideration of creating water adaptation measures to ensure the availability of water for food production and consumption. Thus, studies aimed at saving water usage in the irrigation process have increased over the years. Typical commercial sensors for agriculture irrigation systems are very expensive, making it impossible for smaller farmers to implement this type of system. However, manufacturers are currently offering low-cost sensors that can be connected to nodes to implement affordable systems for irrigation management and agriculture monitoring. Due to the recent advances in IoT and WSN technologies that can be applied in the development of these systems, we present a survey aimed at summarizing the current state of the art regarding smart irrigation systems. We determine the parameters that are monitored in irrigation systems regarding water quantity and quality, soil characteristics and weather conditions. We provide an overview of the most utilized nodes and wireless technologies. Lastly, we will discuss the challenges and the best practices for the implementation of sensor-based irrigation systems.

Intelligent transport systems are the rising technology in the near future to build cooperative vehicular networks in which a variety of different ITS applications are expected to communicate with a variety of different units. Therefore, the demand for highly customized communication channel for each or sets of similar ITS applications is increased. This article explores the capabilities of available wireless communication technologies in order to produce a win-win situation while selecting suitable carrier( s) for a single application or a profile of similar applications. Communication requirements for future ITS applications are described to select the best available communication interface for the target application(s).

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is widely used in a wide range of applications from military to civilian applications from the past years. However, during communication either with the control room/ground station server(s) or moving access points in the sky, security and privacy is one the crucial issues which needs to be tackled efficiently. In this direction, blokchain technology can be one of the viable solutions due to the immutability and traceability of various transactions and decentralized nature. In this paper, we provide in-depth challenges and issues of applicability of blokchain in 5G-based Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled IoD environment. We propose and analyze a new blokchain based secure framework for data management among IoD communication entities. The proposed scheme has ability to resist several potential attacks that are essential in IoT-enabled IoD environment. A detailed comparative analysis exhibits that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality requirements, and also provides less communication and computation overheads as compared to other related schemes.

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), secure information sharing among vehicles is crucial in order to upgrade driving safety as well as to strengthen vehicular services. However, public communication among vehicles leads to various potential attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, unlinkability and traceability attacks. To address this issue, we design a new conditional privacy preserving batch verification-based authentication mechanism in the IoV environment using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technique, where a vehicle can authenticate its neighbor vehicle and also a Road-Side Unit (RSU) can authenticate its nearby vehicles in a batch. The proposed scheme is shown to be highly secure against a passive/active adversary through various security analysis, such as random oracle based formal security, formal security verification via automated simulation tool, and also informal security analysis. An exhaustive comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality attributes, and comparable storage, communication and computation overheads when these are compared with the relevant schemes.

To keep the services and applications of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) stable and active, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are considered as an essential building block to maintain and manage its features. A wide deployment of VANETs is possible only after addressing numerous research challenges. One of the most complicated issues consists in designing a routing strategy, taking into consideration several serious constraints, and especially in a network such as VANET. The severity of these issues would be increased significantly when a VANET is deployed over an urban area, where we distinguish the high mobility of nodes and existing obstructions (e.g., buildings, bridges, tunnels, etc.). In this paper, an efficient routing solution based on a flooding technique is conceived to make the data delivery more reliable and to guarantee robust paths. Vehicles can cooperate in ad hoc fashion with existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This kind of collaboration provides reliable routing paths and ensures alternative solutions in the case of path failures. Furthermore, a prediction technique is used to expect the expiration time of each discovered path. To limit the overhead over the network, all control packets are characterized by their static size making the originality of this work. Based on the simulation outputs, we discuss the performances of the proposed approach as compared with other dedicated previous schemes in terms of several metrics. The obtained results demonstrate that the hybrid communication between vehicles and UAVs based on the proposed flooding technique is perfectly suited to improve the data delivery process.