A Real-Time Wireless Protocol Proposal for Remote Agricultural Machine Control

Fully automated agricultural field treatments and Precise Farming are coming in shortly; yet increasing production needs demand a more efficient, planned and harmonized interaction between the machinery clusters involved in the work sessions. Soon a strong, effective and integrated standardization will be more than needed. This is the path the ISO standardization working group ISO TC 127/SC19/WG5 has taken. The approach that the paper undertakes, is to design a protocol over IEEE 802,11(a/b/g/n) (Wi-Fi), which can meet the requirements only partially, and flanking the TCP/IP stack with another ad-hoc protocol to provide a sufficient and guaranteed level of determinism, required for real time synchronization. A software environment based on GNU/Linux, with its wireless management tools and socket API for the development of the prototypes has been used, along with COTS wireless networking interfaces and hardware. The results will prove that, even with standard components, the protocol is affordable, safe and with a low latency; so well suitable to be put through the standardization procedure.