Cloud Computing for IoT Applications in Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Review on the Trends and Challenges Toward Sustainability

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture is an approach for guiding actions required to make agricultural activities more productive and sustainable with regard to resource sharing, cost saving, and efficient agro-system construction. Agricultural informatization, through the adoption of new technological trends such as cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT), is an extensive prospect to realize sophisticated applications aiming in the development of services in rural areas for the benefit of climate-smart agriculture. Especially the integration of cloud computing and IoT technologies for applications in agriculture, through the automation and digital management of the entire agricultural production and food chain, is an innovative research field of significant concern. In this paper an attempt is made to survey the technological background of these technologies, as well as to review the main trends and identify the challenges regarding the adoption of cloud-based IoT applications in the agricultural sector for the benefit of sustainability in climate-smart agriculture.