AgraNet - Communication platform for mobile and time-critical agricultural processes

The optimization of agricultural processes in terms of an "Agrartechnik 4.0" leads to growing communication between agricultural machinery. These processes, which are often highly time-critical and dynamic, require reliable communication mechanisms. Communication requirements will continue to increase in the future: research concepts predict the division of tasks into self-organizing and self-acting swarms of machines that cooperatively work together on processes. Todays and future use cases create an "Internet of Agriculture".

So far, only one radio technology is chosen for most use cases in the area of agriculture. Divergent communication requirements of the processes and their applications result in different needs for quality of service (QoS) classes, which describe quality characteristics such as robustness, bandwidth and latency of a connection. Such quality of service classes are not yet specified, nor can the communication be assembled and configured application-specifically from different radio technologies. If users can not be reached due to poor network coverage, shadowing or process changes, they will only learn this in the event of a failure-free communication attempt. They do not learn that they were able or will be able to communicate a few moments sooner or later and can not orientate their processes to this. With the communication platform to be developed this should change: The platform is initially configured at the process planning time on the basis of the application-specific requirements and adapted continuously to dynamic changes at runtime by means of adaptive communication configuration.

The goal of the AgraNet-Project is the prototypical realization of a communication platform for the "Agrartechnik 4.0". The platform should form the basis for the implementation of current and future cooperative use cases. In relation to the respective application, infrastructure-based and infrastructural communication technologies for the local and long-distance area are combined and provided with the required quality of service in terms of resilience, latency, bandwidth, etc. Mechanisms for self-organization automatically provide necessary adjustments to the communication configuration due to time-critical and dynamic processes. The aim is to enable cross-company networking of agricultural machineries and process participants with application-specific optimization.