5G on the Farm: Evaluating Wireless Network Capabilities for Agricultural Robotics

Abstract: Global food security is an issue that is fast becoming a critical matter in the world today. Global warming, climate change and a range of other impacts caused by humans, such as carbon emissions, sociopolitical and economical challenges (e.g. war), traditional workforce/labour decline and population growth are straining global food security. The need for high-speed and reliable wireless communication in agriculture is becoming more of a necessity rather than a technological demonstration or showing superiority in the field. Governments and industries around the world are seeing more urgency in establishing communication infrastructure to scale up agricultural activities and improve sustainability, by employing autonomous agri-robotics and agri-technologies. The work presented here evaluates the physical performance of 5G in an agri-robotics application, and the results are compared against 4G and WiFi6 (a newly emerging wireless communication standard), which are typically used in agricultural environments. In addition, a series of simulation experiments were performed to assess the ``real-time'' operational delay in critical tasks that may require a human-in-the-loop to support decision making. The results lead to the conclusion that 4G cannot be used in the agricultural domain for applications that require high throughput and reliable communication between robot and user. Moreover, a single wireless solution does not exist for the agricultural domain, but instead multiple solutions can be combined to meet the necessary telecommunications requirements. Finally, the results show that 5G greatly outperforms 4G in all performance metrics, and on average only 18.2ms slower than WiFi6 making it very reliable.