The world population is anticipated to increase by close to 2 billion by 2050 causing a rapid escalation of food demand. A recent projection shows that the world is lagging behind accomplishing the "Zero Hunger" goal, in spite of some advancements. Socio-economic and well being fallout will affect the food security. Vulnerable groups of people will suffer malnutrition. To cater to the needs of the increasing population, the agricultural industry needs to be modernized, become smart, and automated. Traditional agriculture can be remade to efficient, sustainable, eco-friendly smart agriculture by adopting existing technologies. In this survey paper the authors present the applications, technological trends, available datasets, networking options, and challenges in smart agriculture. How Agro Cyber Physical Systems are built upon the Internet-of-Agro-Things is discussed through various application fields. Agriculture 4.0 is also discussed as a whole. We focus on the technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) which support the automation, along with the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) which provides data integrity and security. After an in-depth study of different architectures, we also present a smart agriculture framework which relies on the location of data processing. We have divided open research problems of smart agriculture as future research work in two groups -from a technological perspective and from a networking perspective. AI, ML, the blockchain as a DLT, and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) based hardware security fall under the technology group, whereas any network related attacks, fake data injection and similar threats fall under the network research problem group.
The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a bigger picture that tries to fit the Internet of Things (IoT) that is widely deployed in smart applications. IoE brings people, data, processes, and things to form a network that is more connected and increases overall system intelligence. A further investigation of the IoE can really mean creating a distributed network focusing on edge computing instead of relying on the cloud. Blockchain is one of the recently distributed network technologies which by structure and operations provide data integrity and security in trust-less P2P networks such as IoE. Blockchain can also remove the need for central entities which is the main hurdle for the wide adoption of IoT in large networks. IoT “things” are resource-constrained both in power and computation to adopt the conventional blockchain consensus algorithms that are power and compute-hungry. To solve that problem, this paper proposes EasyChain, a blockchain that is robust along with running on a lightweight authentication-based consensus protocol that is known as Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh). This blockchain based on the lightweight consensus protocol replaces the power-hungry transaction, blocks validation steps, and provides ease of usage in resource-constrained environments such as IoE. The proposed blockchain is designed using the Python language for an easy understanding of the functions and increased ease of integration into IoE applications. The designed blockchain system is also deployed on a single-board computer to analyze its feasibility and scalability. The latency observed in the simulated and experimental evaluations is 148.89 ms which is very fast compared to the existing algorithms.
Globalisation has facilitated different industries to eliminate geographical boundaries and equipped organisations to work collectively to produce goods. Pharmaceuticals is one such industry which has majorly benefited from globalisation to reduce costs and increase profitability at different aspects of research, development, manufacturing of drugs and finally distribution of drugs. Globalisation not only reduces costs and increases profits for the industry, it also makes essential medication available to all individuals even at remote areas of undeveloped, developing and developed countries. As the number of entities or participants grew in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC), the complexity and abstractness of the drug delivery from manufacturer to consumer has increased, which raised new concerns like counterfeit medication, incorrect, incomplete or no information about the drug reaching the consumer thus undermining customer confidence and most importantly distribution delays which can cause serious impact on the life of the consumer as well as business growth. Considering all these challenges, there is a dire need for a robust PSC which can eliminate blind parties and provide a transparent chain. A transparent PSC will eliminate data fragmentation between different participating entities by creating a trail of secure, single source of truth for the entire life cycle of a medicine, thereby eliminating the introduction of counterfeits and ensuring the consumer safety. This article proposes a novel Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based transparent supply chain for PSC and proof‐of‐concept is implemented to analyse the scalability and efficiency of the proposed architecture. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the technologies which can provide such transparent PSC and Smart Contracts (SC) are the most commonly used component in such systems to implement business logic and access control mechanisms. The proposed PharmaChain model investigates all the interactions between the main entities in PSC and also addresses smart contract issues such as re‐entrance, randomness and lacking trustworthy data feed. Results are compared with other proposed solutions for PSC based on DLT.
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