The Convergence of UAVs, IoT, and Edge Computing: A New Era of Data-Driven Precision Farming
Mohammad Shahnawaz Shaikh, Sheetal Mungale, Neelam Agrawal, Nilesh Khodifad, Mohammad Iqbal Shaikh
Abstract
Agricultural challenges are increasing due to climate change, decreasing resources and increasing global population. Traditional farming methods and cloud-based agricultural solutions often struggle with disabilities, high delays and poor connectivity, especially in remote areas. The study introduces flying-edge computing, a UAV-based computing model designed to increase smart agriculture by enabling real-time data processing for decision making and data collection. By integrating UAV with IoT technology, the proposed structure improves resource management, increases monitoring accuracy, and enables accurate agricultural intervention in remote places, unlike clouds and fog computing, which rely on stable internet connection, flying-edge computing processes, which complete tasks to overcome the network boundaries on the edge. A performance assessment compares the UAV-based systems with traditional farming methods, assessing factors such as delay, data accuracy, processing speed, and scalability. Conclusions expose the UAVs as an effective solution to immediately address agricultural challenges, which pave the way for data-operated autonomous farming. This research distributes flying-edge devices to carry forward accurate agriculture, to ensure flexible food systems against future operating risks.