Wireless communication protocol for agricultural machines synchronization and fleet management

In the last years, Precision Farming and Farm Automation in Agricultural field, have been requesting short range wireless communication systems for machine synchronization and long range wireless communication for fleet management, and for production and task control in real time. Existing protocols can meet the requirements only partially: different legislation and product availability in different countries make it difficult to identify a solution for the global market. TCP/IP protocol and GPRS/GSM networks meet the requirements for long range communication, but not for real time communication needed for short range communication. The paper presents a comprehensive proposal based on UDP and TCP/IP protocols with embedded controls, apt to create a quasi-isochronous wireless communication for machine synchronization.