Last week, just a few miles away from the massive crowds and gleaming machines at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, a small group of academics, government officials and telecom industry folks met for a two-day conference discussing research, the rural digital divide and how to build a network that helps foster the next generation of applications for agriculture.

The conference, called AraFest, focused on the completion of Phase 2 of the ARA wireless network, announced earlier this year. ARA is a 5G wireless network currently spanning about 200-plus square miles; it covers the Iowa State University (ISU) campus, the City of Ames, and surrounding research and producer farms. Faculty and graduate students at ISU believe it to be the only commercial-grade 5G standalone (SA) network used entirely for research. 

ARA borrows its name from the star constellation and pulls some letters from "Agriculture and Rural Communities." It is one of four network testbeds managed by the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, created by the National Science Foundation. As an Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC), ARA is set up to help with open radio access network (RAN) research, providing network- and device-level testing of performance and interoperability either in a lab setting or out in one of the many, many fields.

Light Reading toured and covered another PAWR project in early 2023: the POWDER network in Salt Lake City. 

A 5G standalone cell tower, part of the ARA wireless network, on a production farm in Boone, Iowa. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

The ARA evolution

Phase 1 of the ARA network build included the four basestations establishing a commercial-grade network. The researchers at ISU used a 5G SA core and multiple massive 5G MIMO basestations donated by Ericsson in the midband and mmWave band. The Ericsson-supplied connectivity helps researchers develop and test precision agriculture applications and do field research with drones, robots and other experimental gear. 

Phase 2 of the network was about expanding ARA's reach in addition to the number of ways and kinds of devices researchers can connect to the network. ARA now has seven total basestation sites, dozens of programmable radios, and a multi-hop mesh network for wireless backhaul. The network's towers also use software-defined radios (SDRs) from NI, which is now a part of the 133-year-old conglomerate Emerson. The programmability of the network is a huge emphasis because of the needs of researchers and application developers, including some at AraFest representing the Pentagon and the US commercial aviation industry. 

A journalist's limo, Iowa State style. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

Each of the newer ARA wireless towers has massive MIMO (mMIMO) antenna arrays from the Houston, Texas, startup Skylark Wireless, as well as Aviat microwave radios for backhaul connectivity. The Aviat radios operate in the 11GHz and 80GHz spectrum bands, and there did appear to be fiber backups for the radio-based backhaul. The Skylark Wireless gear was deployed with research APIs for communications using TV white space (TVWS) spectrum, yet another way for commercial, academic or government research groups to run tests for connectivity and latency. The backhaul setup, researchers say, makes it possible to study long-distance wireless performance so they can conduct experiments on network performance in rural areas.

A group of researchers discuss the different modes of connectivity, radio types and bandwidth parameters for new experiements. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

In person, AraFest attendees watched student-built drones with mostly off-the-shelf parts soar over a cornfield and stream live video back to the conference. The network techs observed latency, video packet loss and network performance, giving the assembled crowd an idea of how better connectivity can help commercial farmers with mapping, seeding and monitoring field conditions with ease and accuracy and in a way that allows them to apply AI and machine learning to their observations. 

An ARA wireless research drone sits at a demo station at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

A modular robot platform ("Amiga" by farm-ng) is outfitted by ARA researchers with multiple types of connectivity so it can autonoumously check and record insect traps in this soybean field. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

The telco/rural divide

This network and all the capabilities the ISU team has unlocked so far help illustrate how far apart the connectivity and spectrum needs of some users are from what the telecom industry generally handles. 

Rather than just having cash and subsidies pushed at farms to buy tech, these wireless testbeds have the scale to address a new kind of rural-focused broadband innovation, according to Hongwei Zhang, ARA's principal investigator and the director of ISU's Center for Wireless, Communities and Innovation. "Besides solving broadband challenges today, we have to start asking, "What are the root causes, and how do we address those?" he said.

Even with increasingly better 5G coverage in rural America, attendees here said the ARA network is a critical project because the telecom operator's business model isn't usually compatible with the individual needs of farmers and rural businesses. 

The PhenoBot 2 robotic field data collection platform can be used in corn fields to count crops, send images, provide mapping and more. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

At the Farm Progress Show, unmanned helicopters by Rotor Technologies can support up to seven simultaneous communications links on board. But what are they connecting to? (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

Telcos deliver scale and reach and excel in connecting densely populated areas. Farms need networks that are almost built with their individual connectivity needs in mind, and they struggle to articulate those needs to telcos because they aren't as profitable as customers when compared to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Jaydee Griffith, Managing Director of the ATIS Next G Alliance, noted that the telecom industry favors metrics like the number of users and average revenue per user. On a rural farm, a user – an IoT device – may not bring in enough revenue to make for a compelling use case. 

The business of connectivity is one barrier. Another is how spectrum is used, and there is definitely a need for more spectrum flexibility, researchers here said. Using commercial spectrum on shared networks works in some cases but generally isn't good enough for the advanced needs of tomorrow's agribusiness. 

When discussing the evolution of precision agriculture, University of Notre Dame professor Monisha Ghosh, a former CTO of the FCC, said farmers could use 5G technology, but "you shouldn't be deploying it on a cellular band or a licensed cellular band because you will never get the quality of service you need if it has to coexist with everything else."

"Yes, you can do things like network slicing and all of that, but to have that, you first have to have a network in place, and we don't have that on those farms," Ghosh said. She praised the ARA network for allowing different types of connectivity experiments and open source components throughout, allowing for more creativity when developing new applications and solving digital divide challenges.

Like rural farmers and agricultural businesses, the US military and the commercial aviation industry are both interested in networks that feature several modes of connectivity and yet can be viewed and managed as a single entity. "The overlap between these areas is immense," said Benjamin Haan, Director of Mission Systems and the Advanced Technology Center at Collins Aerospace. 

Haan said that commercial aircraft and rural wireless needs are similar in that they're islands of connectivity, where the environment changes as each new device and vehicle is used. Companies like Collins aim to enable airlines and other operators to pull a massive amount of data from aircraft quickly during their flight turnarounds – everything from what movies were watched to the health of the aircraft components. They have to do this without disturbing existing systems in surrounding areas. 

Rows of corn on a production farm in Central Iowa. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

In military applications, soldiers and military workers face "bad terrain, bad line of sight," and a wide range of tasks that could involve everything from pulling small data from IoT devices to taking command and control of a remote vehicle or drone, Haan said.

Scott Fox, Senior Advisor and 5G & Cyber SME Team Lead at the Defense Department, underscored the US government's interest in open source software and open RAN networks, like ARA's. He said the transparency of seeing inside networks and understanding them helps the Defense Department manage its own presence on networks and fulfill any number of use cases it has for 5G technology. 

Since government tech "cycle times" have been "uncomfortably long" in the past, Fox said the Defense Department is working with academia and the commercial telecom industry to change that. "The goal is to do this quickly and efficiently, leveraging commercial technology to increase feature velocity and leverage global economies of scale," Fox said. 

A row of American flags outside the entrance of the Farm Progress Show in Iowa. (Source: Phil Harvey/Light Reading)

With broad interest and investment in this network testbed, more than one AraFest speaker reminded the audience that the technology adoption rate in rural communities is always going to be slower than the pace of change in technology. 

Melvin Carter, Director of the Division of Agricultural Systems for the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), said small and midsized farmers need to have a voice in the connectivity options and technologies built for their communities. "We have to make sure that as we build these systems, they're in the room and in those conversations as well. It's not just for the scientists, not just the tech people, but those people that are going to have to buy into these systems," Carter said.