A comprehensive survey on IoT and AI based applications in different pre-harvest, during-harvest and post-harvest activities of smart agriculture

Today farmers around the world are gradually embracing Smart farming assisted by different cutting-edge technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a major role in the development of smart agriculture applications. Artificial intelligence, edge computing, cloud computing, big data, etc are other forefront technologies used in smart agriculture. Stages of Agriculture activities for a certain crop can be broadly classified into three categories, viz, pre-harvest, during harvest and post-harvest phases. In each phase, many activities have to be performed. Pre-harvesting stage involves seed selection, land preparation, crop selection, etc., during harvesting includes irrigation, disease analysis, pathogens detection, etc. and Post harvesting involves storage, cooling, reaping, etc. In the current work, we have carried out a thorough literature review of these activities involving smart farming one by one. We have attempted to find the flaws in terms of IoT devices, security, dataset, and methodologies used in these existing works. Based on the research gaps a 5G-based smart farming framework has been proposed. We have also presented a brief comparative analysis between our survey and the existing surveys. Our survey has been found to be more comprehensive compared to the existing ones in many regards.