Energy Efficient RIS-Assisted SWIPT-IoT Systems in Smart Agriculture

Despite rapid advancements in digital agriculture, achieving reliable and energy-efficient wireless connectivity across large and remote farmlands remains a major challenge. Existing solutions fail to address the dual problem of limited coverage and constrained energy resources in distributed internet-of-things (IoT) networks. This article introduces an integration of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) as a unified communication-energy framework for next-generation smart agriculture. Unlike conventional systems, the proposed RIS-SWIPT design intelligently controls wireless propagation while simultaneously delivering energy to power field-deployed IoT nodes, enabling self-sustaining and maintenance-free operation. The novelty lies in extending RIS-SWIPT to multiple agricultural domains—including smart farming, livestock tracking, storage management, and agri-logistics. Furthermore, the article quantifies the performance through a comprehensive simulation study of use cases related to RIS-SWIPT integration with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), vehicle-to-everything (V2X), multi-user multi-input single-output (MISO) and distributed RIS (D-RIS) frameworks. We further highlighted new opportunities, design insights, and research challenges for future sustainable agricultural networks.