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Solar insecticidal lamps Internet of Things (SIL-IoTs) is a novel physical agricultural pest control implement, which is an emerging paradigm that extends Internet of Things technology towards Solar Insecticidal Lamp (SIL). SIL-IoTs is composed of SIL nodes with functions of preventing and controlling of agricultural migratory pests with phototaxis feature, which can be deployed over a vast region for the purpose of ensuring pests outbreak area location, reducing pesticide dosage and monitoring agricultural environmental conditions. SIL-IoTs is widely used in agricultural production, and a number of studies have been conducted. However, in most current research projects, fault diagnosis has not been taken into consideration, despite the fact that SIL-IoTs faults have an adverse influence on the development and application of SIL-IoTs. Based on this background, this research aims to analyze the characteristics and challenges of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs, which naturally leads to a great number of open research issues outlined afterward. Firstly, an overview and state-of-art of SIL-IoTs were introduced, and the importance of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs was analyzed. Secondly, faults of SIL nodes were listed and classified into different types of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) faults. Furthermore, WSNs faults were classified into behavior-based, time-based, component-based, and area affected-based faults. Different types of fault diagnosis algorithms (i.e., statistic method, probability method, hierarchical routing method, machine learning method, topology control method, and mobile sink method) in WSNs were discussed and summarized. Moreover, WSNs fault diagnosis strategies were classified into behavior-based strategies (i.e., active type and positive type), monitoring-based strategies (i.e., continuous type, periodic type, direct type, and indirect type) and facility-based strategies (i.e., centralized type, distributed type and hybrid type). Based on above algorithms and strategies, four kinds of fault phenomena: 1) abnormal background data, 2) abnormal communication of some nodes, 3) abnormal communication of the whole SIL-IoTs, and 4) normal performance with abnormal behavior actually were introduced, and fault diagnosis tools (i.e., Sympathy, Clairvoyant, SNIF and Dustminer) which were adapted to the mentioned fault phenomena were analyzed. Finally, four challenges of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs were highlighted, i.e., 1) the complex deployment environment of SIL nodes, leading to the fault diagnosis challenges of heterogeneous WSNs under the condition of unequal energy harvesting, 2) SIL nodes task conflict, resulting from the interference of high voltage discharge, 3) signal loss of continuous area nodes, resulting in the regional link fault, and 4) multiple failure situations of fault diagnosis. To sum up, fault diagnosis plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability, real-time data transmission, and insecticidal efficiency of SIL-IoTs. This work can also be extended for various types of smart agriculture applications and provide fault diagnosis references.

Along with the increasing awareness of environmental protection and growing demand for green and pollution-free agricultural products, it has a great need to explore new ways to apply greener pest control methods in agricultural production. Researching on Solar Insecticidal Lamps (SILs) has continuously received incremental attentions from both the academia and industry, which brings a new mode for the preventing and controlling of agricultural migratory pests with phototaxis feature, and now is becoming to a hot research topic. Towards the fast development of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" as well as the increasing demands for agricultural informatization, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used for agricultural information collection and intelligent control of agricultural equipment. WSNs are suitable for large-scale deployment and regional monitoring, which can be easily combined with SIL nodes. Based on the combination, a new type of agricultural Internet of things - Solar Insecticidal Lamps Internet of Things (SIL-IoTs) was proposed and the technology of WSNs for the prevention and control of phototactic migratory pests in agricultural applications were surveyed. Firstly, the state-of-art insecticidal lamps applications was reviewed and their characteristics deployment manners and working lifetime in the production of crops (e.g., forest, fruits, rice, vegetables) were summarized. Secondly, the characteristics of existing GSM/3G/4G-enabled SIL nodes and their latest research status on SIL-IoTs were summarized. Furthermore, the research status was analyzed concerning the energy harvesting mode and deployment characteristics of SIL, which are solar energy SIL harvesting mode for energy saving and the heuristic mode for node deployment, respectively. Finally, towards the fast-developed vision of smart agriculture, in which various emerging IT and automation technologies are maturely applied, SIL-IoTs can be considered as a new and important component to contribute to the green agricultural pest monitoring and control. To further enhance SIL-IoTs' capability and enrich SIL-IoTs' function, four open research issues on SIL-IoTs were proposed, i.e., 1) optimized deployment scheme of SIL-IoTs with multiple constrains, 2) optimized and adaptive energy management strategy for ensuring normal working hours of SIL node, 3) lack of algorithms for pests outbreak area localization, and 4) interference on data transmission because of dense high voltage discharge during severe pest disaster. To sum up, SIL-IoTs is one of the representative applications of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" based on WSNs, which is a new model on prevention and control of pests. The combination of both optimized deployment algorithms of SIL-IoTs nodes and artificial intelligence techniques will provide a theoretical basis for SIL-based applications in terms of optimized deployment and energy management. Intelligent pest information collection, alarm, and node' senergy management via SIL-IoTs will facilitate decisions-makings for precise agricultural applications in prevention and control of pests.