Ericsson and the Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW), which is funded by the National Science Foundation, are collaborating on the use of 5G for drone operations in support of smart agriculture.
In a demonstration hosted at North Carolina State University, the AERPAW team equipped a custom drone with a connected camera and local compute capacity. The demonstration used a 100 MHz channel at 3.4 GHz under AERPAW’s experimental program license, which provided speeds exceeding 450 Mbps downlink and 100 Mbps uplink.
The video from the drones was used to monitor a field of cattle for information on grazing patterns. Footage from the remote field was streamed over a 5G connection enabled by an Ericsson base station and Ericsson Cloud Packet Core network.
“The advanced connectivity of a 5G network provides the capabilities needed to sustain high-quality video streaming, support remote interaction, and enable analytics at the edge through communication with a local compute-enabled network node,” Ericsson said.
The global agriculture drones market is expected to grow at a 19.2 percent CAGR to $6.2 billion in 2028, according to Research Dive. The growth in the global smart crop monitoring market will be driven by increasing demand for food and the growing need for precision, digital, and smart agriculture practices.
New Technologies Quickly Moving from Lab to Field
The collaboration with AERPAW is helping to speed up the transfer of new technologies from university labs to industry end-users, according to Ericsson. “It’s great to see Ericsson and AERPAW showcasing how collaboration can bring together research and 5G networks to support critical operations supporting public safety and agriculture monitoring,” said Per Wahlen, Vice President and Head of Business Development at Ericsson North America.
AERPAW, based in Raleigh, NC, is one of four testbeds in the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program supported by the National Science Foundation. Its mission is to accelerate fundamental research with unmanned aerial vehicles using advanced 5G wireless communications and networking technologies.
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