Connected Cows: Utilizing Fog and Cloud Analytics toward Data-Driven Decisions for Smart Dairy Farming

A Systematic Survey on the Role of Cloud, Fog, and Edge Computing Combination in Smart Agriculture

“…The arable farming applications include crop management [ 53 , 54 ], soil management [ 55 , 56 ], irrigation management [ 57 ], weather management [ 58 , 59 ], and greenhouse management [ 60 , 61 ]. Moreover, pastoral or livestock farming includes animal monitoring [ 62 , 63 , 64 ] such as monitoring diseases and behaviour. However, researchers have categorised these domains from different perspectives.…”

“…For instance, Refs. [ 62 , 63 ] implemented a system for animal behaviour analysis and health monitoring in a dairy farming scenario. In order to monitor animal welfare, the authors of [ 64 ] developed an open-source system.…”

“…The applications and systems about smart agriculture and modern computing paradigms were observed from our survey. The notable applications are Decision Support System (DSS) for potato late blight disease prevention [ 69 ], Cloud of Things (CoT)-based automated irrigation system [ 75 ], Cloud-based digital farm management system for vegetable production process management and quality traceability [ 96 ], Fog assisted application for animal behaviour analysis and health monitoring in dairy farming [ 62 , 63 ], a smart agricultural knowledge support system to provide real-time information [ 80 ], smart farm computing systems for animal welfare monitoring [ 64 ], and a greenhouse system [ 61 ].…”

“…We have noticed that the different combinations have been used in the surveyed applications—for example, Edge-Cloud, Fog-Cloud, Edge–Fog–Cloud, and Cloud computing applications. As shown in Table 6 , the most common combination of applications are from the Fog-Cloud [ 25 , 60 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 75 , 85 , 86 , 97 , 98 ]. Moreover, most of the applications were Cloud-based applications with IoT sensors as the bottom layer [ 53 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 61 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 74 , 76 , 78 , 81 , 83 , 84 , 87 , 89 ].…”

“…Moreover, the use of combinations also brings the benefits such as low latency [ 59 , 79 , 80 , 97 ] and saving on bandwidth [ 59 , 97 ]. Additionally, the applications solved the problems when they deal with data in terms of reliable data collection [ 86 ], reduction of data redundancy [ 73 ], data storage [ 53 ], data security [ 80 , 97 ], real time analytics [ 62 , 63 ], reduction in data traffic [ 66 , 98 ], and maximum utilisation of data [ 84 ]. Furthermore, in some papers, authors have mentioned that efficiency [ 56 , 60 , 69 , 75 , 80 , 83 ] is one of the major advantages, and some other authors pointed out more specifically what is efficient such as resource utilisation [ 53 , 97 , 98 ], power utilisation [ 82 , 85 ], low execution time [ 59 ], efficient decision-making [ 57 , 58 ], and automation [ 57 , 59 , 60 , 76 , 81 ].…”