IoT-Driven Smart Farming using Wireless Sensor Networks: Comprehensive Survey on Data Collection Techniques and Challenges

Abstract— Agriculture is a critical sector for global food security and economic stability, yet it faces unprecedented challenges due to rapid population growth, urban expansion, and the adverse impacts of climate change. Precision agriculture, enabled by the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), offers a promising solution by enabling continuous monitoring and data-driven decision-making for optimized resource utilization and improved crop yields. WSNs, composed of spatially distributed sensor nodes, facilitate real-time collection of environmental parameters such as soil moisture, temperature, humidity, and nutrient levels, which are transmitted wirelessly to centralized systems for analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of IoT–WSN technologies applied in smart farming, with a focus on wireless communication protocols including RF, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, GSM, and Wi-Fi. Each protocol is evaluated in terms of range, data throughput, energy efficiency, scalability, and reliability, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and suitability for different agricultural contexts. Comparative analysis reveals that while short-range, low-power protocols like Bluetooth and Zigbee excel in energy efficiency, they are constrained by limited coverage; GSM provides wide-area connectivity but incurs higher operational costs; and Wi-Fi offers high throughput and scalability at the expense of greater power consumption. The review identifies key challenges such as energy constraints, environmental interference, network scalability, and cost barriers, and outlines future research directions for developing low-cost, energy-efficient, and resilient IoT–WSN architectures tailored for large-scale precision agriculture.