# Wireless Mesh Networking: An IoT-Oriented Perspective Survey on Relevant Technologies
## 7 Ongoing and Future Developments
### Smart Agriculture  
As a representative use case in a rural setting, one can consider a farm composed by several cultivated fields, spread on a wide area and cultivated with different types of plants and fruit trees, a botany greenhouse, an agricultural vegetable garden, and a stable with livestock, like the one shown in Figure 13.  
This scenario can be interpreted, from a networking point of view, as a \"mesh of meshes\", where each sub-mesh corresponds to each farm component and has the capability of exchanging data and information through a \"smart\" entity, namely, a gateway federating all these wireless technologies. Hence, the smart gateway should be a main-powered device equipped with several network interfaces, such as: (i) an IEEE 802.11s radio transceiver, for Wi-Fi mesh support; (ii) a Bluetooth 5.0 radio interface, supporting Bluetooth mesh networking; (iii) a LoRa transceiver; (iv) an IEEE 802.15.4 radio interface; and (v) a wired network interface (e.g., Ethernet), enabling the gateway to connect to the Internet in a fast and reliable way. Please note that all these interfaces could be externally pluggable (e.g., through USB dongles). As can be easily understood, there is the need for a middleware layer, on top of the bottom protocol stacks, able to abstract the network interfaces for the upper layers. In this way, the mesh-oriented software running at the application layer is unaware of the features of each network interface but, rather, has only to manage the traffic from an interface to another one. In this holistic architecture, the gateway (and its application software) acts like a \"broker\", routing incoming traffic toward another interface in a fast and smart way. To carry out this task, one needs to define common  
Figure 11: LoRa-based network with intermediate relay. Figure 12: Full dump and data packet structure. addressing and translation modes among the different communication technologies--e.g., based on IPv4/IPv6 or similar. Assuming that the agricultural vegetable garden is positioned next to the farmer's house, it is possible to build a BLE-based mesh network composed by different BLE devices (each of them connected to one or more sensors), with the aim of monitoring vegetables health indicators, as well as ground and air parameters. This architecture makes it possible to avoid a central collector (harvesting the information coming from the BLE mesh network) and, thus, allows to send this data to the farmer house's smart gateway, through its Bluetooth 5.0 radio interface. If the agricultural vegetable garden is placed too far from the farmer's house to be able to directly reach the smart gateway through BLE communications, it is possible to add a local gateway into the garden, in turn equipped with a BLE interface (allowing it to integrate with BLE-based mesh network) and a long-range radio interface, such as LoRa. In this way, the data collected by the BLE mesh network monitoring the agricultural vegetable garden are transferred to the farmer house's smart node through the LoRa protocol. For another perspective of integration of short-range and long-range communication technologies see also [78]. Regarding the botany greenhouse, it is possible to deploy a solution similar to the one proposed for the agricultural vegetable garden, as well as to define a Wi-Fi-based network. In the latter case, a mesh network composed by several Wi-Fi nodes can be deployed, where each node is equipped with sensors for monitoring relevant parameters inside the greenhouse (e.g., ground humidity and temperature, air temperature, pollution, etc. ), and with a Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) through which external mesh-unaware Wi-Fi clients are allowed to interact with the Wi-Fi mesh network and able to retrieve monitoring data (e.g., with the additional usage of a mobile app).