Towards Digital Agriculture: IoT Connectivity through a Multilayer NTN

Digital agriculture, enabled by technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), necessitates robust and efficient connectivity solutions to become a reality, especially in rural and remote regions where terrestrial network infrastructure falls short. This paper introduces a novel 3D network architecture, which encompasses two layers of Non Terrestrial Networks (NTN): the first NTN layer includes drones, while the second one is made by a constellation of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. The proposed drone layer allows optimizing communication between IoT devices and LEO satellites, by improving reliability, increasing throughput, and reducing packet queuing time. Using preliminary simulation results, we show the potential of the proposed multilayer NTN architecture to support IoT data collection for precision agriculture applications.