Survey, comparison and research challenges of IoT application protocols for smart farming

Smart farming era has already begun and its societal and environmental implications are expected to be huge. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become the major path forward towards novel farming practices. The unprecedented capability of data collection and management offered by IoT is based on several factors of the underlying communication network architecture and technology, one of the most important being the application level protocol that is used among IoT nodes, gateways, and application servers. This work offers an up-to-date survey of research efforts on the IoT application layer protocols, focusing on their basic characteristics, their performance as well as their recent use in agricultural applications. Furthermore, it provides a comparison among them, in terms of well-accepted key performance indicators and comments on their suitability in the framework of smart farming as well as the corresponding challenges that have to be faced towards their efficient implementation. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.