It may be hard to believe today, but the modest pigeon performed a heroic role as a messenger during World War I. Pigeons were especially valuable as a source of fast communication. Even before the 20th century, they were the conductors of information delivering love letters to their recipients. However, the Internet and computer technologies have taken their place in the modern world.
XGAIN provides a decision support tool using 5G-and last-mile provision in remote areas is tailored to the needs of communities, farms and forestry. In Lithuania, innovative crop assessment technology based on drones/planes and hyperspectral cameras are working on multidimensional data aggregation and heavy load computation. Current situation in rural connectivity limits its usage to the bigger farms. Therefore, it is important to provide hybrid solutions of local (drones/local server processing) as well as edge or cloud-based solutions, to efficiently handle data transferring from areas with limited internet connectivity such as a farm field of forests.
Depending on the strength of the 5G connection there are 2 main scenarios:
Depending on the server-side algorithm’s performance, users of the tool should be able to get the results and plan their actions after a timeframe of 5 to 10 minutes. The planned edge equipment is suitable for complex nonlinear multidimensional optimization and data analysis models, such as various neural networks, enabling on-situ heavy computation tasks that would provide efficient transmission policies.
For smaller farm sites, uncontrolled data transmissions may result in significant delays when sensed data originate from disconnected areas, and also induce additional costs when transmitting voluminous data streams to a remote server, for instance, over a cellular channel.
The envisioned services will have a direct impact on precision agriculture and environmental monitoring and control. Knowing an exact situation in the field can help farmers easily detect problems and exact locations, plan fertilization, spraying, and other activities based on actual plant needs, divide the field into parametric zones for variable rate application and generate maps for autonomous machinery.