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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Mississippi State, Mississippi » Crop Science Research Laboratory » Genetics and Sustainable Agriculture Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #141010
Title: IMPLEMENTATION OF A WIRELESS HIGH-SPEED LOCAL AREA NETWORK FOR PRECISION AGRICULTURE APPLICATIONS

Author
item McKinion, James
item Jenkins, Johnie
item Willers, Jeffrey
item Read, John

Submitted to: National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/12/2003
Publication Date: 5/17/2003
Citation: Mckinion, J.M., Turner, S. B., Willers, J. L., Jenkins, J.N., Read, J.J., McDade, J. 2003. Implementation of a wireless, high-speed local area network for precision agriculture applications [abstract]. Proceedings National Cotton Council Beltwide Cotton Conference. p. 2553.

Interpretive Summary: Not required.

Technical Abstract: A demonstration project implementing a wireless local area network(WLAN)which connected the farm stead with tractors, cotton pickers, combines, and spray equipment along with consultant's vehicle and hand-help personal digital assistants (PDAs) via 802.11 or popularly called WI-FI radios will be presented. The 802.11 industry standard allows the use of DSSS (direct sequence spread spectrum) or FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum) radios to implement a WLAN in the public use frequency band 2.400 to 2.483 GHz. This project takes advantage of both types of radios to implement a WLAN with 90% coverage of 650 ha of contiguous farm land. To provide a high-speed Internet connection for rapid transfer of information and data to and from the farm from and to the USDA-ARS facility at Mississippi State, MS, located 65 Km away, a bidirectional commercial link was obtained from DirecWay, Inc. This connection allows a minimum downlink data rate of 500 kbps and an uplink ranging from 75 kbps to 150 kbps, depending upon system usage. Network computing at the farm stead was performed by a Dell Network Server using MS Windows 2000 Server software. Additional components of the network were the connection of two additional farm houses to the network via point-to-point radio links of 1.6 Km and 4.7 Km, respectively.