Ideal Communication Facilities for Smart Irrigation Systems in Short Range and Long-Range Scenarios

Agriculture is one of the key aspects that affects the growth of a country. Extreme weather conditions and climate change are something that the agriculturists and the farmers have always found difficult to deal with. Irrigation is an essential agriculture practice that enhances crop production by providing adequate water to the land. Irrigation in essential because they maintain the soil moisture and help in the absorption of nutrient contents. From time immemorial and even till date, irrigation has been done manually with the need of human interventions. With the advancement in the technology, one question always arose. Is it possible to automate some or all the parts of agriculture to maximise the yield? The notion of smart irrigation came into existence. The agricultural industry was able to overcome the said disadvantages of traditional irrigation procedures by incorporating "smart" technologies into irrigation systems. IoT can make agriculture and farming processes more efficient by automating them and reducing human interference. Smart irrigation systems and solutions are being embraced in many regions of the world due to their numerous benefits. The difference is with respect to the way of implementation, the communication network that these applications made use of and the environmental conditions where these applications were used. This paper aims at reviewing certain approaches to smart irrigation from the perspective of communication technologies used and perceive ideal communication technologies that can be used for communication over a shorter range and for the communication over longer range