## 5 Connectivity Limitations of Smart Farming in Remote Areas
### Case Study 1: Meshed LoRaWAN Gateways for Smart Farming in Remote Areas  
To address longer coverage and redundant connections, the meshed LoRaWAN gateway [77; 78] was tested to get city wide coverage. This study [77] has used 18 channels LoRaWAN gateway [79] with overlapping area to ensure redundant communication support between gateways as illustrated in Figure 4.  
Few researches also looked into the performance and reliability of meshed LoRaWAN gateways [78; 80; 81] for remote and large scale deployment. Based on these existing research, current technology of the meshed LoRaWAN gateways perform poorly and low reliability [80]. There is work to implement offline mobile computing at the edge [76] to process collected data onsite from a local LoRaWAN gateway. This reduces the requirement of getting IoT networks connected to the internet directly. However, the offline mobile computing at the edge reduces the capability of the high computational decision-making process with the help of existing global knowledge. There have been some attempts to use renewable power sources for LoRaWAN gateways, but little or no work have been done towards self sustained power sources for gateways in remote areas. Although there has been work done to optimise power usages during active and passive communication of gateways, no work exists for LoRaWAN IoT gateways specifically in meshed network scenarios. Moreover, the remote maintenance of networked IoT gateways requires further investigation for a sustainable smart farming system in remote areas. Although some connectivity challenges for remote smart farming are getting investigated, other challenges listed above need further attention from the research community and industry to evolve smart farming into becoming suitable for remote areas. Therefore, it will be useful to see some innovation towards a networked IoTgateway which ensure adaptive channel distribution, full duplex communication, data transmission, and user privacy for a trusted object network in remote setup. Case Study 2: Satellite Communication Systems to Provide Connectivity to Smart Farms in Remote Areas of Australia  
In remote areas where connectivity via cellular communication is not available, satellite systems are considered to be the better alternative of cellular systems to provide connectivity to IoTs and UAVs. In Australia, there are few providers of satellite communications services in rural and regional Australia, which can support the connectivity of smart devices. A popular communication satellite is Low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which are placed at heights between 100 km to 2000 km and orbit very quickly [82]. As a consequence, they move in and out within Line of sight (LOS) regularly during every 9-10 min. In order to have continuous access (e.g., LOS), the service providers must have a large numbers of satellites in orbit in a given location. This allows a hand-over from one satellite to another as they depart line of sight from a given user. A common LEO satellite system in Australia is U.S. based Iridium [83; 84] with a constellation of 66 LEO satellites. In the Iridium, each satellite in the constellation not only maintains communication with the ground user, but they also maintain contact with two to four adjacent satellites and routes data between them, hence effectively creating a large mesh network. LEO communications satellites have comparatively low latency times and can support high bandwidth due to their proximity to ground. For instance, Iridium offers a low-latency Short Burst Data (SBD) service that is specialized for the M2M and IoT market. Another LEO satellite communications system is Globalstar, where the data and calls are passed from satellite to local gateways located in some places in Australia such as Meekathara, Dubbo and Mt Isa [85]. They use 24 satellites that need to be within the range of ground stations during data or call exchange.