Evaluating multipath routing protocols to improve video transmission for precision agriculture

Precision agriculture (PA) is the application of technologies and principles to manage spatial and temporal variability related to crop production. A new PA application is emerging where semi-autonomous tractor systems with remote supervision requires real-time video transmission. This paper analyses the use of multipath routing protocols over an ad hoc network for farming areas and evaluates quality of service metrics, such as delivery frame rate, end-to-end delay and Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio, of the transmitted video flows. Results were obtained through simulation using NS-2 with Evalvid Framework. Simulation results show that QD-SMR has slightly higher PSNR results with less variability than AOMDV, and also better PSNR results than D-SMR and SMR when two or three video flows were transmitted.