Wireless Sensor Network Implementations in Precision Agriculture and Associated Network Fault Management Frameworks: A Survey

Precision Agriculture (PA) utilizes Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to continuously monitor and collect data on both plants and machinery. Thereafter, data-driven proactive decision-making is used for crop protection, yield optimization, and other agriculture management tasks. These WSNs rely on clustering protocols to facilitate sensor node communications. However, the adverse, spatio-temporal nature of agricultural environments and the need for real-time operation pose severe challenges that manifest as physical and protocol-level network faults. This survey adopts a novel perspective of Cross-Layer Resilience in Spatio-Temporal Agricultural IoT to evaluate how hardware-level physical faults cascade into routing failures. We survey a range of clustering protocols and fault management frameworks devised to address these faults using proactive and reactive techniques, ultimately enabling sensor networks to maintain survivability and continuous quality of service.