Real-time communication based on IEEE 802.11b/g for automation of agricultural vehicles

Current farming practices try to reduce soil compaction, carbon-dioxide emission, fuel consumption and to fulfill further environmental goals. Another goal of current farming practices is to minimize the duration for handling a field, in order to become independent of extreme weather conditions. Such environmental and economic goals may be met through increased automation and robotization in agriculture. As known from the industrial sector, automation and robotization is based on reliable communication. On implementing this in agriculture, an important prerequisite for the coordination of farm vehicles are real-time wireless networks. Such networks have to fulfill the demands of real-time systems and take into account the characteristics of mobile vehicles and groups of vehicles with their special mobility patterns and radio environment. We present a new approach for soft real-time networks based on IEEE 802.11. Our idea is the use of available sensory information like the signal strength of transmitters and relative position of vehicles in order to predict the real-time service quality for moving agricultural vehicles. We prototypically implement our method on board of two agricultural vehicles. Finally, we evaluate and discuss the results for agricultural usage and propose further improvements.