New Technologies for Smart Farming 4.0: Research Challenges and Opportunities

Submission Deadline: 15 August 2019

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of New Technologies for Smart Farming 4.0: Research Challenges and Opportunities.

According to a United Nations report published in June 2017, the world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050 [1]. Agriculture consumes a tremendous amount of natural resources. For example, agriculture uses 70% of the world’s fresh water supply [2]. Under the constraints of limited planet resources and the deteriorating climate environments, how to produce sufficient and high quality food to feed the increasing population is a pressing issue faced by the human race.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, agriculture has been advancing continuously to precision agriculture, commonly referred to as agriculture 3.0, through the adoption of new technologies, such as GPS, satellite imaging and advanced image analysis. Smart farming 4.0 is posed to significantly advance the state-of-the-art of agriculture through the integration of a broad range of additional advanced technologies, including Internet-of-things (IoT), cloud computing, etc. [4]. In the report, “The future of technology in agriculture” published by a Netherlands research center in 2016, 20 new technologies have been identified to increase agricultural and livestock yield while using less resources and preserving natural environments and biodiversity [3].

Currently many organizations and private companies (e.g., IRSTEA and MOSANTO) throughout the world are actively investigating new technologies for agriculture. They are from many different industries and economic sectors, ranging from finance, engineering, food retailers, to industry associations and groups of small farming suppliers [2]. Due to the diversity and heterogeneity of the stakeholders, it is important to facilitate dialogues and cooperation in the process of developing standards for smart farming and improving interoperability between different systems and technologies.

This Special Section in IEEE Access aims to present cutting-edge research in the areas of cyber physical systems, IoT, and cloud platform and services for smart farming 4.0. We solicit theoretical and practical contributions, as well as surveys or reviews with clear use cases.

The topics of interests include, but are not limited to:

  • Holistic cyber physical systems for smart farming
  • User-friendly and application-oriented visualization and decision support system
  • Interoperability of heterogeneous devices and actuators
  • Multi-support edge routers and communication protocols
  • Ontology, sensor metadata and semantic data
  • Big data systems and technologies
  • Scalable IoT cloud platforms for small to large farms
  • Massive data integration and fusion
  • Unmanned robotic vehicle, unmanned aerial vehicle, and collaborative processing of remote and proximity sensory data
  • Wireless network access medium, low power WiFi and BLE
  • Robust, energy efficient and long lifetime architecture of WSN node for outdoor application and field test
  • Robust and low cost user-friendly plug and play wireless sensor node, network architecture and implementation
  • New environment sensor technologies
  • Energy harvesting techniques for battery-less IoT node
  • AI and machine vision for agriculture and aquaculture.

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

 

Associate Editor:  Kun Mean Hou, University Clermont Auvergne, France

Guest Editors:

  1. Hadi M. Aggoune, Sensor Networks and Cellular Systems Research Center, University of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia
  2. Jean-Pierre Chanet, L’Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement et l’agriculture, France
  3. Yongsheng Gao, Griffith University, Australia
  4. Chengcheng Guo, Wuhan University, China
  5. Sudip Misra, School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India
  6. Yi Shang, University of Missouri, USA.

 

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Big Data Analytics in Internet-of-Things And Cyber-Physical System
  2. Convergence of Sensor Networks, Cloud Computing, and Big Data in Industrial Internet of Things
  3. Fairness in Futuristic Wireless Networks: Applications, Implementation, Issues, and Opportunities


IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief:
Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: kun-mean.hou@uca.fr