Internet of Things in Greenhouse Agriculture: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Applications, and Protocols

The greenhouse is one of the sustainable forms of smart agricultural farming. It is considered as an alternate method to overcome the food crisis which is generated due to high population growth, climate change, and environmental pollution. Although this method supports off-the-season crops within the enclosed area even in severe climatic zones. It has required to efficiently control and manage the crop parameters at a greenhouse in a more precise and secure way. The advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced smart solutions to automate the greenhouse farming parameters such as plant monitoring, internal atmosphere control, and irrigation control. The survey presents a hierarchy on the major components of IoT-based greenhouse farming. A rigorous discussion on greenhouse farming techniques, IoT-based greenhouse categories, network technologies (cloud/edge computing, IoT protocols, data analytics, sensors) has been presented. Furthermore, a detailed discussion on mobile-based greenhouse applications and IoT applications has been presented to manage the greenhouse farm. Moreover, the success stories and statistical analysis of some agricultural countries have been presented to standardize IoT-based greenhouse farming. Lastly, the open issues and research challenges related to IoT-enabled greenhouse farming has been presented with state-of-the-art future research directions.