Sensor Data Transmission in Smart Agriculture: Challenges, Potentials, and Limitations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Smart agriculture is a key application domain of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), where cyber–physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-driven analytics converge to improve productivity, sustainability, and resource efficiency. In this context, large volumes of sensor data collected in the field form the basis for automated monitoring, decision support, and adaptive control across agricultural processes. However, the value of such data depends not only on sensing technologies and connectivity, but also on how data are generated, transferred, processed, and interpreted throughout their lifecycle. This paper is organized in two parts. The first part reports a narrative review of the literature, based on a documented search protocol, and provides an overview of sensor data and sensor data transmission networks in smart agriculture. It examines the main challenges, potentials, and limitations associated with IoT-based field deployments in 4IR environments, and consolidates them into ten open problems. These problems are ordered from the device layer to the socio-economic layer and span physical robustness, device security, rural connectivity, aerial sensing, interoperability, labelled-data scarcity, explainability, federated access control, data ownership, and cost. The second part responds to these open problems with the conceptualization of a layered architecture and a set of design proposals, covering hierarchical edge security, offline-first synchronization, semantic interoperability, explainable decision support, and farmer-centric data governance, that are grounded in established techniques and standards but have not been implemented or empirically validated in this work; they are intended as a design blueprint and a starting point for future prototyping and evaluation rather than as measured results. The paper is accordingly positioned as a conceptual, perspective-oriented contribution: it states the procedure by which the open problems were derived from the reviewed works, it states what the proposed integration is claimed to add over existing smart-agriculture architectures, and it sets out an evaluation plan that fixes the metrics and the baselines against which each proposed component would have to be tested. Throughout both parts, particular attention is given to the role of data integrity and provenance as foundational elements for trustworthy agricultural data, enabling reliable analysis, auditability, and long-term reuse. By synthesizing current approaches, open issues, and conceptual solution patterns, this paper aims to support the design of resilient, transparent, and future-ready smart agriculture systems aligned with the principles of the 4IR.