To sustain and expand the agricultural economy even as its workforce shrinks, the efficiency of farm operations must be improved. One key to efficiency improvement is completely unmanned driving of farm machines, which requires stable monitoring and control of machines from remote sites, a safety system to ensure safe autonomous driving even without manual operations, and precise positioning in not only small farm fields but also wider areas. As possible solutions for those issues, we have developed technologies of wireless network quality prediction, an end-to-end overlay network, machine vision for safety and positioning, network cooperated vehicle control and autonomous tractor control and conducted experiments in actual field environments. Experimental results show that: 1) remote monitoring and control can be seamlessly continued even when connection between the tractor and the remote site needs to be switched across different wireless networks during autonomous driving; 2) the safety of the autonomous driving can automatically be ensured by detecting both the existence of people in front of the unmanned tractor and disturbance of network quality affecting remote monitoring operation; and 3) the unmanned tractor can continue precise autonomous driving even when precise positioning by satellite systems cannot be performed.

In this paper, we examine techniques for improving the throughput of unlicensed radio systems such as wireless LANs (WLANs) to take advantage of multi-radio access to mobile broadband, which will be important in 5G evolution and beyond. In WLANs, throughput is reduced due to mixed standards and the degraded quality of certain frequency channels, and thus control techniques and an architecture that provide efficient control over WLANs are needed to solve the problem. We have proposed a technique to control the terminal connection dynamically by using the multi-radio of the AP. Furthermore, we have proposed a new control architecture called WiSMA for efficient control of WLANs. Experiments show that the proposed method can solve those problems and improve the WLAN throughput.

Distributed detection techniques of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatially multiplexed signals are studied in this paper. This system considered employs multiple mobile stations (MSs) to receive signals from a base station, and then share their received signal waveforms with collaborating MSs. In order to reduce the amount of traffic over the collaborating wireless links, distributed detection techniques are proposed, in which multiple MSs are in charge of detection by making use of both the shared signal waveforms and its own received waveform. Selection combining schemes of detected bit sequences are studied to finalize the decisions. Residual error coefficients in iterative MIMO equalization and detection are utilized in this selection. The error-ratio performance is elucidated not only by computer simulations, but also by offline processing using experimental signals recorded in a measurement campaign.

In this paper, we propose a novel centralized control method to handle multi-radio and terminal connections in an 802.11ax wireless LAN (802.11ax) mixed environment. The proposed control method can improve the throughput by applying 802.11ax Spatial Reuse in an environment hosting different terminal standards and mixed terminal communication quality. We evaluate the proposed control method by computer simulations assuming environments with mixed terminal standards, mixed communication quality, and both.

Low-latency and highly reliable communication on wireless LAN (WLAN) is difficult due to interference from the surroundings. To overcome this problem, we have developed a scheme called Clear to Send-to-Station (CTS-STA) frame transmission control that enables stable latency communication in environments with strong interference from surrounding WLAN systems. This scheme uses the basic functions of WLAN standards and is effective for both the latest and legacy standard devices. It operates when latency-strict transmission is required for an STA and there is interference from surrounding WLAN devices while minimizing the control signal overhead. Experimental evaluations with prototype systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.