The current wireless technologies are unable to keep up with the rising demand for high throughput wireless communication links. With its high bandwidth and projected gigabits per second (GBPS) connection, the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum has the ability to satisfy the demand. However, the wireless channel in the agricultural environment is not well understood to date. In comparison to urban and rural channels, the agricultural scenario is more difficult and distinct due to crop lifespan and growth behavior.
For understanding the mmWave propagation characteristics in the agricultural environment, we prepare a testbed in the Spidercam facility of the University of Nebraska – Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center (ENREC). In this testbed, we install mmWave communication devices and edge computer to characterize the agricultural environment.
Apart from the mmWave devices, we also utilize a pair of Ubiquity Nanobeam devices which operate in 5GHz frequency. These nanobeams are used to establish a long-distance point-to-point communication link for managing the mmWave nodes.
We use Meta Terragraph radios (60GHz) for our mmWave experiments. To conduct the experiments, we install the radios in the agricultural field. We refer to these devices as the mmWave nodes. The nodes and nanobeams are mounted with tripods and one of the nodes is connected to the edge computer.
We set up the nodes in different types of crop fields such as soybean and corn fields. After the completion of each day's experiment, the collected data are offloaded to the cloud.