Agriculture meets IEEE 802.11p: A Feasibility Study

Recent trends towards autonomous driving are complemented by vehicular networking solutions, leading to what we now call cooperative autonomous driving systems. This trend is quite visible to the public in the automotive domain; however, only few know about the massive technological progress in the agricultural world. Here, autonomous driving, i.e., automated harvesting, etc, is already standard and early approaches to cooperative maneuvers have been brought to market already. The open question is how to internetwork all heavy machinery. We address exactly this issue and study the feasibility of wireless communication protocol stacks, in particular IEEE 802.11p, developed for use on the road - now for in-field operation. We performed an extensive measurement study, which brings up several quite interesting findings that need to be taken care of when adopting these protocol stacks to agricultural applications.