Wireless- and 5G-enabled industrial automation is expected to include a plethora of different applications with a wide variety of requirements. In this article, evaluations are undertaken for the deployment of 5G in realistic industrial production environments with realistic deployment settings. Both deployments using commercial 5G systems and a 5G prototype system including pre-commercial and standard compliant URLLC functionality have been investigated. Systematic latency and reliability measurements were performed, over the air and in live networks, for different packet sizes, different devices, and networks with different capabilities (at different sites) to characterize the expected performance. The results indicate that today’s 5G latency performance significantly depends on packet size, transmission direction (uplink or downlink), and network configuration as well as on the end device’s design and capabilities. Our over-the-air measurements also empirically show that 5G technology and future networks have the capability of providing one-way latency of around 1 ms in both uplink and downlink for the various packet sizes tested. It is concluded that the requirements for very low latencies can be achieved with high reliability guarantees, as required in some of the most stringent industrial IoT applications.

The 5G non-public network deployments for industrial applications are becoming highly interesting for industries and enterprises owing to dependable wireless performance characteristics. With an increasing trend of network deployments in local licensed and/or shared spectrum, coexistence issues naturally arise. In this article, we present our detailed empirical results on the performance impact of a 5G NR indoor non-public network from a 5G NR outdoor network operating in the same mid-band spectrum. We present experimental results on the uplink and downlink performance impact of a non-public indoor network deployed on an industrial shopfloor. Our results quantify the impact on the uplink and downlink performance characteristics based on realistic traffic loads in a non-public indoor network when using synchronized and unsynchronized Time Division Duplex (TDD) patterns, different UE deployment locations and interference levels. We also present results on mitigating interference effects through robust link adaptation techniques. We believe that this is the first article, which reports quantified 5G NR cochannel coexistence results based on a detailed and systematic study, and provides signficant insights on the cochannel coexistence behavior in realistic deployment scenarios of an industrial shopfloor.