An Extensive Analysis of Flying Ad-Hoc Network Applications and Routing Protocols in Agriculture

Introduction

With the speedy technological enhancement and decrement in manpower, technologies are being involved in every phase of our life, and their proper application leads to a healthy life indeed. Different sensors and electronics equipment are deployed to commercialize and maintain cost-effectiveness in several domains. Precision farming is a revolutionary approach used by farmers to maximize inputs like water and fertilizers, improving efficiency, quality, and yields. This definition also includes the minimization of pests and diseases by targeting spatially. Pesticide-level precise agriculture enables the farmer to deal correctly with each part of his field, enabling him to tackle crop diversification. Farmers being more suitable for planting, harvesting, and fertilization contributes to higher farm production and profitability while upholding environmental standards. Agriculture is an industry involving a vast volume of data and gets influenced by disease of plant and pest appearance. These data are also linked to quantitative environmental characteristics like ambient temperature, soil temperature, chemical composition, precipitation, solar radiation, and crop quality. A list like this one reporting, coupled with appropriate processing techniques, would bring new opportunities for rural advancement. The information and communication technology (I.C.T.) and its development will promote more data-oriented agriculture. Different advances such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing are mixed in sequence (Mukherjee et al., 2020).

Intelligent data analysis and successful dissemination of knowledge to agricultural stakeholders and smart farming (Zainal et al., 2019) are required to introduce productive data collection. In turn, geospatial tools such as the Global Navigation and Global Positioning System in precision agriculture, even the satellite network (GNSS), will play an important role in indicating any component's exact position. Wireless sensor network (W.S.N.) (Yick et al., 2008) (Ghosh et al., 2020) and AdHoc Network (Shobana et al., 2013) (Godse and Mahalle, 2018), especially FANET (Flying AdHoc Network) (Bujari et al., 2017), a new form of Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) (Khamayseh et al., 2019), is one of the efficient platforms which we can apply for betterment of agriculture. The increase in the production of UAVs is also a promising approach for collecting real-time details, as it is considered one of the most ambitious precision-farming technologies (Cauvery, 2020) (Alamsyah et al., 2019). UAVs can enforce a series of steps like data collection, data preparation, data interpretation, and data management. Single-mode and multi-mode UAV systems are both suitable for the application of FANET. Their willingness to travel makes them much more desirable since they can get useful knowledge and ground evaluation in a shorter period. The biggest downside is that the UAV is a complex model which requires the synchronization of multiple scientific logics with technologies for successful functionality.

The next section describes some related works already existing in the concerned area of research. Section 3 discusses different routing protocols that have been applied in the state-of-the-art agricultural applications of FANET. The application areas of agriculture have been demonstrated in Section 4. Finally, section 5 identifies areas suffering from lack of focus and finds out possible future works to address the existing challenges.