IoT-Based Smart Agriculture: A Comparative Review of Sensors, Communication Technologies and Computing Architectures

This comparative review examined the major technological components of IoT-based smart agriculture, including sensing, communication and computing. The literature demonstrates that agricultural IoT is not a single technology but an integration of devices and services designed for particular field conditions. Soil and environmental sensors provide the basic information required for monitoring, while communication technologies determine how reliably and efficiently that information can be transferred. LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are useful options for many wide-area telemetry applications, whereas Wi-Fi, ZigBee and BLE remain relevant for local deployments. Cloud, fog and edge computing provide different trade-offs between computational capacity, latency, connectivity dependence and energy use. The main conclusion is that technology selection should be application-driven. A successful agricultural IoT system must consider sensing accuracy, communication range, energy availability, processing requirements, security, cost and long-term maintenance together. Further field validation, interoperability, edge intelligence and sustainable power solutions are important areas for future work.

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