A Study of Electromagnetic Robustness of IO-Link Wireless and SmartMesh IP for Applications on an Agricultural Vehicle

This paper presents a study on the electromagnetic robustness of IO-link Wireless and SmartMesh IP for their use on an agricultural vehicle. Especially the multipath fading due to the reflective nature of the agricultural vehicle is challenging for such wireless communication protocols. The electromagnetic robustness was tested in a double reverberation chamber as well as on an actual combine harvester. Detailed test setups and procedures are in the paper. Throughout the tests, several key parameters related to the quality of service (QoS) of both protocols were monitored with a specific focus on latency and packet error rate (PER). Test results show that both IO-link Wireless and SmartMesh IP experience a decrease in data throughput and an increase in latency in a (semi-)reverberant environment. In particular, transmission power needs to be carefully regulated for IOLW, while SmartMesh IP is dependent on the mesh formation and the distance between its Manager and Motes. Test results also show that a fully reverberant environment is harsher than the actual harvester. Thus, the initial steps were made to dampen the RC with absorbers to comply with the environment created in a harvester, resulting in a comparable PER of 4.1 %.