# Internet of Things-Based Smart Precision Farming in Soilless Agriculture: Opportunities and Challenges for Global Food Security

**Authors:** Monica Dutta, Deepali Gupta, Sumegh Tharewal, Deepam Goyal, Jasminder Kaur Sandhu, Manjit Kaur, Ahmad Ali Alzubi, Jazem Mutared Alanazi  
**arXiv:** [2503.13528](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13528)  
**Date:** 2025-03-15  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/arxiv-id/2503.13528v3/

## Key points

- The rapid growth of global population and decline in cultivable land threaten food security
- Climate change exacerbates challenges by reducing available farmland
- Soilless agriculture methods like hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics offer sustainable solutions
- Integration of IoT with smart precision farming enhances resource efficiency and automates environmental control
- IoT-enabled smart farming systems optimize water and nutrient usage through real-time monitoring and automation
- Opportunities and challenges of IoT-based soilless farming are explored for sustainable agriculture and food security
- Advanced farming techniques ensure greater productivity, resource conservation, and year-round cultivation
- Obstacles include high initial investment costs, technological dependency issues, and energy consumption concerns
- Analysis of scientific publication trends shows a steady increase in research output on soilless cultivation methods
- Key documents by authors like Singh Sekhon Bin and Lin KH have received high citations in this field

## Summary

The rapid growth of the global population and the continuous decline in cultivable land pose significant threats to food security. These challenges are exacerbated by climate change, which further reduces available farmland. In response, soilless agriculture methods such as hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics offer sustainable solutions by enabling efficient crop cultivation in controlled environments. The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with smart precision farming enhances resource efficiency, automates environmental control, and ensures stable high-yield crop production. Utilizing real-time monitoring, data-driven decision-making, and automation, IoT-enabled smart farming systems optimize water and nutrient usage while minimizing human intervention. This paper delves into the opportunities and challenges of IoT-based soilless farming, emphasizing its role in sustainable agriculture, urban farming, and global food security. These advanced farming techniques guarantee greater productivity, resource conservation, and year-round cultivation. However, they also face obstacles like high initial investment costs, technological dependency issues, and energy consumption concerns. Through a comprehensive study incorporating bibliometric analysis and comparative analysis using tools like Biblioshiny in RStudio with data from Scopus database downloads containing 7,764 articles – trends in research output are examined. The analysis highlights annual scientific publication trends showing a steady increase from 371 articles in 2013 to 1,064 in 2022. Notably between 2019 (748 articles) and 2021 (1,053 articles), there was a surge reflecting growing interest in soilless cultivation methods. Citation analysis reveals key documents with Singh Sekhon Bin's article securing the highest number of citations at 636 followed by Lin KH's article with 547 citations. Furthermore, a three-field plot illustrates correlations among authors (AU), keywords (ID), and author countries (AU_CO) in CEA-enabled smart agriculture through a Sankey diagram for top authors highlighting strong connections within this research domain. This detailed exploration supports informed decision-making to address food security challenges while promoting sustainable agricultural innovations through vertical farming and Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)-enabled soilless techniques. By identifying current trends and research gaps while outlining future directions for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders, this research aims to drive innovation and scalability in IoT-driven soilless agriculture for a more sustainable agricultural future.