Wireless Communications for Internet of Farming: An Early 5G Measurement Study

Data-driven agriculture and Internet of Farming (IoF) require reliable communication systems. Nowadays, only some of the key use cases demanded by the agricultural industry verticals get support from multiple state of the art wireless technologies such as 4G, Wi-Fi, or Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, combined with satellite and cloud access. However, the ones demanding very high data rates or very low latency are still not feasible. With 5G, designed for flexible support of Extreme Mobile Broadband (xMBB), Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) and Ultra-reliable Machine-Type Communications (uMTC), more agricultural use cases will be possible. This paper provides a reference list of data-driven agriculture scenarios and use cases with their associated communication requirements, and whose feasibility is evaluated in a live 5G trial performed in a representative rural area scenario in the south of Denmark. The paper details a reference methodology for assessing 5G Quality of Service (QoS), including multi-connectivity schemes and reports the empirical 5G performance results, which are put in perspective of the requirements for the different IoF reference scenarios. The empirical results indicate that early 5G deployments are already capable of reliably serving data-driven agriculture vertical use cases such as those related to agricultural logistics or configuration of machinery and diagnostics in 65.8-99% of the cases; but it will be necessary to wait for 5G network upgrades and coming 5G Releases in order to operate the more low latency demanding use cases.