Private 5G for Outdoor Connectivity – Large & Small Agricultural Farms

Example 3: Agricultural farms

In this next chapter of our blog series on outdoor private 5G, we provide a production example deployed in a rural setting.

A smaller farm campus is characterized by a few central barn structures with surrounding stretches of farmland. Such a facility might be involved in growing and packaging fruits and vegetables, and animal husbandry. The use cases here vary widely, including metrics collection from greenhouses and agricultural IoT devices, tracking cows to prevent rustling, and using drones to monitor the environment.

The below picture on the left is of a 100-acre farm at a research university where new breeds of apples are being developed. A discovery call and an initial site survey identified the coverage boundary, shown with a red outline. A barn structure with existing Internet access and structural stability for mounting a couple of radios and sector antennas was identified, as shown below. This allowed the installation cost to be kept to a minimum.

An RF tool was used to model the antennas and their coverage. It demonstrated adequate coverage using the two sectors. After the installation, the antenna azimuths and tilts were slightly adjusted based on actual walk testing at key points.

Industrial Farms

Next, we will consider a large industrial farm. It’s a rural setting like the small farm, but on a much bigger scale. The picture with the crop circles shown below is a part of a larger farm. The use case could be metric collection from irrigation pumps, agricultural IoT devices, and connected tractors. The devices are connected to the private 5G network via intermediate cellular routers. Each of the yellow pins in the picture below identifies a point of interest for data collection. Initial Internet connectivity was only available to the ‘office’ location in the southwest corner of the section shown above.

For the starting deployment, the customer identified an existing tower as the candidate install structure. Using a single sector antenna at this location, an RF model demonstrated that a two square miles area could be covered, the farthest point of coverage being almost a mile away from the antenna. The terrain was sloping up to the north, so the antenna was uptilted to compensate for the rise. This outdoor deployment highlights the power of cellular to cover a broad area using very few (even one) antennae.

Future deployments on the farm would essentially replicate this model in eight similar sections, each with a radio site selected based on considerations of availability of existing towers or structures, and/or great vantage points overlooking large areas with line of sight that required a new pole. Internet access is being extended to these sites using a small mesh of point-to-point microwave links from the office location. Each radio would cover a few square miles, totaling about 15 square miles.

Conclusion

The initial explanation and multiple examples presented in this blog series highlight several best practices on how to plan for and achieve successful private 5G coverage in an outdoor environment. Depending on the initial projects and objectives identified, an organization can start small and easily scale as more use cases and coverage areas are selected.  The Highway 9 Mobile Cloud, with its distributed scale-out architecture and cloud-based management, allows for outdoor private 5G networks to be deployed and operated very naturally.  The examples also demonstrate how private 5G can be extremely cost-effective in covering large outdoor areas compared to other wireless alternatives.

For more information on the Highway 9 Mobile Cloud, please visit https://highway9.com/products/