Wireless Sensor Network Implementations in Precision Agriculture and Associated Network Fault Management Frameworks: A Survey

Precision Agriculture (PA) utilizes Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to continuously monitor and collect data on both plants and machinery. Thereafter data-driven proactive decision-making is used for crop protection, yield optimization and other agriculture management tasks. These WSNs rely on clustering protocols to facilitate sensor node communications. The adverse nature of agricultural environments and the need for real-time operation pose several challenges to these clustering protocols that manifest as network faults. Fault management frameworks have been devised to address faults using proactive and reactive techniques. This paper surveys a range of fault management frameworks that have been developed to act both proactively and reactively that enable clustering protocols to operate in a manner allowing for sensor network survivability.