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Globalization has led to a new paradigm where the traditional industries, such as agriculture, employ vanguard technologies to broaden its possibilities into what is known as smart farming and the agri-food industry 4.0. This industry needs to adapt to the current market through an efficient use of resources while being environmentally friendly. The most commonly used approaches for analyzing efficiency and sustainability on farms are production efficiency based analyses, such as Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis, since they allow to see how efficient the outputs are generated regardless of the units of measurement of the inputs. This work presents a real scenario for making farms more profitable and sustainable through the analysis of the Data Envelopment Analysis and the application of the Internet of Things and Edge Computing. What makes this model interesting is that it allows monitoring the ambient conditions with real-time data from the different sensors that have been installed on the farm, minimizing costs and gaining robustness in the transmission of the data to the cloud with Edge Computing, and then to have a complete overview in terms of monthly resource efficiency through the Data Envelopment Analysis. The results show that including the costs of edge and non-edge data transfer have an impact on the efficiency. This small-scale study set the basis for a future test with many farms simultaneously.

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Communication systems and networks are evolving as an integral part of not only of our everyday life but also as a part of the industry, fundamental infrastructures, companies, etc. Current directions and concepts, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), promise enhanced quality of life, greater business opportunities, cost-effective manufacturing, and efficient operation management through ubiquitous connectivity and deployment of smart physical objects. IoT networks are able to collect, preprocess, and transmit a huge amount of data. A considerable portion of this data is security-and privacycritical data, which makes IoT networks a tempting option for attackers. Given that these networks deal with the actual aspects of our lives and fundamental infrastructures (e.g. smart grids), cybersecurity in such networks is crucial. The large scale of these networks and their unique characteristics and complexity bring further vulnerabilities. In this study we give an introduction to IoT, focusing on the IoT application layer, security requirements, threats, and countermeasures in this layer, and some of the open issues and future research lines.

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