Smart farming: opportunities, challenges and technology enablers

Agriculture is taking advantage of the Internet of Things paradigm and of the use of autonomous vehicles. The 21st century farm will be run by interconnected vehicles: an enormous potential can be provided by the integration of different technologies to achieve automated operations requiring minimum supervision. This work surveys the most relevant use cases in this field and the available communication technologies, highlighting how connectivity requirements can be met with already available technologies or upcoming standards. Intelligence is considered as a further enabler of automated operations, and this work provides examples of its uses.