Aplicabilidad de modelos teóricos de propagación para entorno urbano en la estimación de las pérdidas a 3.5 GHz en plantaciones de cítricos

Abstract

[EN] Agriculture 4.0 represents a considerable increase in the number of sensors, as well as the appearance of new wireless technologies, which will mean the need to efficiently planning radio communication systems in agricultural environments. In this work, the applicability of the WalfischBertoni and the Ikegami propagation models that have been used to estimate propagation losses in urban environments, has been studied in citrus plantations. The similarities and differences of the profiles between the transmitter and the receiver, have been analyzed to identify the dominant propagation mechanisms in each case: buildings, in urban environments, and trees, in citrus plantations, assuming that the height of the transmitter is above the height of the trees and the height of the receiver below them. The propagation losses estimated by the models have been compared with the measurements carried out at the 3.5GHz frequency (one of the 5G bands) in a lemon plantation after the fruit was collected. Under these conditions, it has been observed how the slope of the regression line of the measurements has a value of 2.7, far from that obtained by the Walfisch-Bertoni model and closer to the one estimated by the Ikegami model. Furthermore, when analyzing the error between the theoretical and the measured losses, a standard deviation of 6.39dB is observed for the Walfisch-Bertoni model and 4.91dB for the Ikegami model.