Space–Air–Ground Integrated Networks for Smart Agriculture and Smart Breeding: A Review of SDN/NFV-Enabled Intelligent Resource Management

Abstract

Smart agriculture and smart breeding are evolving from isolated sensing toward geographically distributed, long-term, data-driven closed-loop management. Dispersed farms and breeding sites, UAV and remote-sensing phenotyping, real-time field control, edge inference, and digital-twin synchronization impose heterogeneous demands on coverage, latency, bandwidth, reliability, computing, and energy. Space–air–ground integrated networks (SAGINs) combine satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles/high-altitude platforms, and terrestrial networks for wide-area coverage and elastic access, but introduce dynamic topologies, heterogeneous multi-domain resources, and complex cross-layer orchestration. Focusing on intelligent SAGIN resource management enabled by software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), this review examines controller placement, NFV/service function chain orchestration, SDN/NFV cooperation, learning-driven optimization, and security mechanisms. Representative studies are compared by objectives, decision variables, mechanisms, applicability boundaries, and engineering costs. These mechanisms are connected to smart agriculture and smart breeding through ubiquitous connectivity, edge computing, task offloading, phenotyping, and digital-twin closed loops, while distinguishing experimentally supported agricultural evidence from SAGIN-oriented architectural inference. Future research should move beyond single-metric optimization toward joint evaluation of state freshness, decision latency, reconfiguration cost, learning and security overhead, and agronomic outcomes to improve deployability, robustness, and verifiability of cross-domain resource management under real deployment conditions across heterogeneous agricultural environments.