# A Secure IoT-Based Irrigation System for Precision Agriculture Using the Expeditious Cipher
###### Abstract
LPWA technologies outperform conventional cellular and short-range wireless technologies for different emerging smart city and machine-to-machine applications such as metering, logistics, industrial monitoring, and agriculture. However, LPWA technologies realize long-range ranging from a few to tens of kilometers and low-power operations at the expense of a low data rate. The primary aim of LPWA technologies is to achieve a 10-year battery life. LPWA technologies are suitable for delay-tolerant applications, as they achieve throughput in orders of ten kilobits per second and high latency in orders of seconds or minutes. Long range is achieved due to the use of the sub-1 GHz band, and the deployment of narrow-band and spread spectrum techniques are the modulation techniques adopted by different LPWA technologies. In [4], the authors compared the technical specifications of various LPWA technologies and standards. The choice of communication technology depended on the application of the IoT device and the type of topology. Third, the internet is the core network layer enabling the availability of data collected by IoT devices anywhere and anytime. Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [5] has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a routing protocol for resource-constrained nodes in IoT. RPL builds a robust topology over lossy links. A destination-oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG) is the core of RPL, which represents a routing diagram of nodes. In [6], the authors proposed an enhanced routing protocol based on RPL called E-RPL that decreases the number of control messages. Moreover, they proposed a flexible multi-constrained objective function (OF) that integrates several metrics such as energy, delay, and bandwidth to define the end-to-end path between the sink and a given node. The simulation results of their proposal revealed a remarkable improvement in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and routing overhead. Finally, different platforms have been developed to provide data analytics, data management, and data storage of the big data collected from sensors. Data analytics (DA) has a primary role in improving the efficiency of smart agriculture systems and in increasing productivity. DA is classified into five classes based on the requirements of IoT applications: real-time analytics, memory-level analytics, offline analytics, business intelligence-level analytics, and massive analytics. In [7], the authors presented big IoT data analytic types, methods, and technologies for big data mining. DA can help in insurance, prediction, storage management, decision-making, farm management, and precision farming. In irrigation systems, the automated decision made by DA controls the water supply timing and quantity. The main objective of big data analytics is to analyze collected information to predict and identify recent trends, find hidden information, and finally, make decisions. Prediction, classification, clustering, and association rules are the main big data analytics methods. Furthermore, smart irrigation is a precision agriculture application [8] that aims to control water consumption in the agriculture sector as a scarce resource in many countries by deploying IoT technology to remotely gather information from sensors implanted in agriculture terrains to monitor soil different parameters in all stages. Based on the collected information, a decision is made on when to irrigate and the water quantity and quality required. Table 1 reviews the recent research on IoT-based precision irrigation systems, highlighting the communication protocol, data analytics, and security techniques deployed in these systems.