# Secure Authentication and Credential Establishment in Narrowband IoT and 5G
## 4 The Use Case of Precise Agriculture  
Regarding recent forecasts of IoT use [33], the deployment of IoT networks is expected to rise from 25 billion devices in 2018 to more than 125 billion devices in 2025. Furthermore, the global IoT market is expected to reach USD 1.567 trillion by 2025. The IoT networks are fundamental for novel services and applications in almost all markets such as precise agriculture, smart cities, and smart factories, among others. To achieve precise agriculture, the farming sector has highly benefited from Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies and is expected to equally benefit from IoT technologies [34] to address recent problems. Some problems such as water quality degradation, underground water depletion, demographic imbalances between rural and urban areas, and the soil salinization process have become evident in arid and semiarid areas [35]. Some of these problems are especially relevant in the Mediterranean region, in which large areas are currently vulnerable to water scarcity and drought events [36]. In the Mediterranean region, irrigated agriculture contributes 75% to the final production. There is a high demand for secure IoT technologies that increase water use efficiency and make additional (non-conventional) water sources available for fertigation, thereby decreasing water scarcity and the discharge of water and nutrients to the environment. These IoT technologies enable precise agriculture to optimise the sustainability of agriculture using precision irrigation techniques, adopting and implementing new water and nutrient management practices. In particular, precise irrigation methods are rapidly developing in order to save water while improving yields and fruit quality. Although irrigation has been practised for centuries, precision irrigation is a new issue, as the sector has had to respond to societal demands for reductions in water allocation and improvements in efficiency. Irrigation strategies have been proven to successfully increase Water Use Efficiency (WUE) by reducing water use. Thus, the current trend of ferritin management implies (i) precision crop irrigation and fertigation, (ii) the use of crop-based information (crop indicators/descriptors), (iii) enhanced analysis, interpretation, and vaporization of the collected data, and (iv) the development of systems for growers' aid on efficient ferritin control. Recent IoT technologies formed by embedded devices (i.e., sensors, gateways, etc) and low-power wireless technologies are being deployed [37] for precise agriculture. In particular, there is a wide variety of possible IoT sensors available on the market for monitoring the conditions of plants, soils, and the environment [38]. The IoT family of innovative wireless technologies is capable of offering many solutions towards the modernization of agriculture. The IoT world offers new LPWAN networks (Low Power Wide Area) such as Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT, and 5G to allow wireless and autonomous devices for monitoring and control without expensive routers or repeaters. LPWAN technologies enable the Internet connection in disperse agriculture places without traditional connections based on 3G/4G cellular technologies. To integrate legacy agriculture machinery, IoT gateways are used to enable the interaction with crop facilities to perform precise data acquisition and enhanced remote actuation over nutrition pumps, irrigation valves, and greenhouse actuators (e.g., ventilation or lighting). Finally, the analysis of IoT data allows for interpreting and valuing the collected data of complex processes, predicting situations, and improving irrigation decisions. However, the lack of standardized security solutions for IoT technologies is one of the main obstacles to deploying IoT devices with wireless communication in agricultural fields. International activities are fostering vendors and users towards IoT products with high security/trustworthiness by standardization efforts and regulations (e.g., ENISA and the EU Cybersecurity Act) [39].