Solution for the industry of tomorrow

The flexibility of 5G makes it the most versatile mobile communications solution for achieving the true potential of Industry 4.0

Manufacturing companies around the world are under extreme competitive pressure due to shorter business and product lifecycles. To compete globally, industries must constantly improve their processes and find innovative ways to respond quickly to changing market requirements. New applications like Industrial Edge (IE), remote diagnostics and maintenance, autonomous machines, intralogistics, and Augmented Reality (AR) applications for service technicians promise major potential in this area.

Leveraging cyber-physical systems and striving towards more automation and autonomous decisions in environments such as smart factories, autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, smart cities, and connected industrial applications, requires substantial resources to deal with the resulting amount of data that needs to be gathered, analysed, and transferred. The success of these applications depends on extremely reliable wireless broadband communication with the lowest possible latencies.

Industrial 5G is the response to a need for end-to-end wireless networking of production, maintenance, and logistics for improvement in efficiency.

Thanks to reliable, powerful broadband transmission with massive machine connectivity and ultra-low latencies, Industrial 5G is the response to a need for end-to-end wireless networking of production, maintenance, and logistics, ensuring a significant improvement in efficiency and greater flexibility in industrial added value.

What makes 5G industrial?

For most of us, the attraction of 5G or the fifth-generation technology for broadband networks for smartphone users is obvious. For example, it allows us to watch 4K videos wherever we want. But it is far more important for industry. It is a milestone on the path to Industry 4.0, allowing smart factories to become more flexible and productive driven by end-to-end digitalisation and the Internet of Things (IoT). Industrial 5G is 10 to 20 times faster than today’s broadband technologies such as LTE or Long-Term Evolution 4G wireless standard and consumes a much lesser amount of energy per bit transferred.

Reliability and ultra-low latency are the most important factors for industrial applications. This makes it imperative for industrial customers to choose a different focus when setting up their 5G networks. These two different focuses lead to two different demand profiles: the public and the industrial.

5G is a milestone on the path to Industry 4.0, allowing smart factories to become more flexible and productive driven by end-to-end digitalisation and IoT.

Industrial 5G, as the name suggests, needs to meet the demands of industrial applications. It is based on the enhanced Release 16 or later of the wireless standard that supports the Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) scenario offering 99.999% reliability with a latency of a few milliseconds. Also, it runs on hardware designed for industrial environments that differ from consumer-based applications. Industrial 5G is run in a local private network and supports industrial protocols OPC Unified Architecture or OPC UA and a machine-to-machine communication protocol used for industrial automation, PROFINET, which is an open Industrial Ethernet solution based on international standards and safety norms.

Depending on the application, not all four of these aspects may be satisfied. For remote access via mobile wireless 5G networks, for example, Release 16 or a local private network are not essential. However, to operate a mobile robot, all four aspects must be covered.

Need both public and private spectrum

Unlike many consumer applications where the focus mostly is on high data rates, industrial networks tend to focus more on low latency and high availability. This is where private 5G networks step in since they can be configured to suit these requirements. Private 5G networks also offer data security; in a self-managed network, the data stays within the company, and the owner can decide where to process which data. In a private 5G, to achieve the URLLC the 5G core must remain in the OT environment. In turn, this also ensures privacy and data integrity for critical applications.

Hence it is also important that the private spectrum for local applications be established on the path to industrial 5G because only then can 5G-based technologies be successfully used in industry worldwide.

The benefits of private networks are obvious. Companies can track, store, analyse, control, and flexibly configure data traffic at their discretion. This allows them to guarantee the speed and reliability that their processes, including all their logistics and production sequences, require.

Over the next few years, private 5G wireless networks will be set up at industrial sites where companies need robust, ultrafast networks with high bandwidth.

In addition to the need for local wireless connectivity, there is increasing demand for remote access to machines and plants. In these cases, communication is usually over long distances. Public mobile networks can be used to access devices that are located at a considerable distance, for example in other countries. In addition, service technicians can connect to the machines they need to service via the mobile network while on the go. Hence Public 5G networks are also an essential element of remote access and remote servicing solutions. They can be used, for example, to provide users with very high bandwidths in urban areas with small radio cells and high frequencies. In rural areas, radio cells have to cover a large area, which is why lower frequencies are used.

At the edges of radio cells, like in the case of LTE or Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), there are often significant losses in terms of both the bandwidth and stability of the communication connection. And it is exactly in these remote areas where stable bandwidth transmission is required for remote servicing or video transmission, for example for water stations. With innovative 5G communications technologies, considerably more bandwidth with greater reliability is available at the edges of radio cells and the average data rate for users within a radio cell increases.

The status of 5G deployment

German companies like Siemens, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BASF, are already investing in 5G. The foundations for industrial 5G networks are also being laid elsewhere. Over the next few years, private 5G wireless networks will be set up at industrial sites wherever companies need robust, ultrafast networks with high bandwidth. From automated racking systems and production lines to augmented reality and robots, the new mobile communication standard will control millions of devices per square kilometre in real-time.

It is only a matter of time before 5G will establish itself in the industry. The flexibility of 5G with its different implementation approaches, private and public, makes this standard the most versatile mobile communications solution for achieving the true potential of Industry 4.0. Solutions previously not feasible are now within reach, and applications no one dared to think about can be realised soon. 

By Suprakash Chaudhuri

Suprakash is the Head – Digital Industries at Siemens Limited

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