A review on monitoring and advanced control strategies for precision irrigation

The demand for freshwater is on the increase due to the rapid growth in the world’s population while the effect of global warming and climate change cause severe threat to water use and food security. Consequently, irrigation systems are tremendously utilized by many farmers all over the world with its associated high amount of water consumption from various sources posing a major concern. This necessitates the increased focus on improving the efficiency of water usage in irrigation agriculture. The advent and rapid successes of the Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced control strategies are being leveraged to achieve improved monitoring and control of irrigation farming. In this review, a thorough search for literature on irrigation monitoring and advanced control systems highlighting the research works within the past ten years are presented. Attention is paid on recent research works related to the monitoring and advance control concepts for precision irrigation. It is expected that this review paper will serve as a useful reference to enhance reader’s knowledge on monitoring and advanced control opportunities related to irrigation agriculture as well as assist researchers in identifying directions and gaps to future research works in this field.