Toward the Internet of Underground Things: A Systematic Survey

Abstract

This paper provides recent advances in the area of Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) with emphasis on enabling communication technologies, networking issues, and localization techniques. IoUT is enabled by underground things (sensors), communication technology, and networking protocols. This new paradigm of IoUT facilitates the integration of sensing and communication in the underground environment for various industries, such as oil and gas, agriculture, seismic mapping, and border monitoring. These applications require to gather relevant information from the deployed underground things. However, the harsh underground propagation environment including sand, rock, and watersheds do not allow the use of single communication technology for information transfer between the surface and the underground things. Therefore, various wireless and wired communication technologies are used for underground communication. The wireless technologies are based on acoustic waves, electromagnetic waves, magnetic induction and visible light communication while the wired technologies use coaxial cable and optical fibers. In this paper, state-of-art communication technologies are surveyed, and the respective networking and localization techniques for IoUT are presented. Moreover, the advances and applications of IoUT are also reported. Also, new research challenges for the design and implementation of IoUT are identified.

On-Site and External Energy Harvesting in Underground Wireless

“…This can cause severe performance degradation and unfairness between the devices [48,49]. This degradation of signals due to an unfavorable sub-surface environment has been studied in detail in the literature [6,[50][51][52][53]. This literature investigates this problem by proposing different underground channel models based on Magnetic Induction (MI), EM, and acoustic technologies.…”

Internet of Things in Smart Agriculture: Enabling Technologies

“…Precision agriculture [4], [20], [3], [8], [10], [12], [19], [20], [24], [36], [38], [35], [37], [32], [34], [26], [27], [28], [29], [25], [31], [33], [30], [41] [42], [43], [44], is the area in which technology can be used to effectively manage agriculture by understanding the temporal and spatial changes in soil, crop, production, and management through innovative techniques. The emerging Information Age will significantly affect the way we conduct and teach precision agriculture in universities and institutes of higher education.…”

Theoretical and Experimental Studies on the Signal Propagation in Soil for Wireless Underground Sensor Networks

“…Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) have received much research interest in recent years since its promising potential applications in various scenarios, such as border intrusion control, underground structure monitoring, smart farming, environment pollution monitoring [1][2][3][4][5]. WUSNs, being underground, play an important role in the Internet of things (IoT) [6,7]. But four aspects of challenges are faced by the real application of WUSNs, namely power conservation, topology design, antenna design and environmental extremes [1].…”