FIGURE 5 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Layout of the AAU 5G Smart Production Lab factory floor including location of the Wi-Fi 6 AP infrastructure (coloured circles), AMR test route (black thick line), and position of the interfering (INT) devices (coloured crosses).
Source publication
Wireless technology is envisioned to be a major enabler of flexible industrial deployments, allowing agile installations and mobility of production elements. However, for industrial IoT (IIoT) use-cases, reliability and service availability remain as key concerns for wide adoption. To enhance wireless link reliability, we propose in this paper a Se...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... testing was done with a MiR200 AMR [26] equipped with the MAGW with the implemented QoS-aware multi-connectivity scheme, which was set to navigate a predefined route with an approximated total length of 140 m in the factory test environment. Such route is marked as a black thick line in Figure 5, which displays the layout of the factory test environment. The route is designed such that there are at least two APs at each position with a RSSI level above the handover threshold θ. ...
Context 2
... ensures repeatability of the mobility pattern across the industrial scenario in the different measurement campaigns performed in the study. The factory floor is equipped with 3 CISCO Meraki MR36 Wi-Fi 6 APs [25], which are deployed at the positions also highlighted in Figure 5. The APs are ceilingmounted and provide full coverage to both factory halls. ...
Context 3
... the loaded network case, two additional active Interferer (INT) devices were deployed per AP. These were deployed co-located at the static positions denoted by the colored crosses in Figure 5, and were configured to generate symmetric traffic, one by generating uplink traffic and the other by generating downlink traffic. Different interference levels (5, 10 and 25 Mb/s) were tested in order to gain further insights on the performance of the connectivity schemes under different network load conditions. ...
Citations
... Multi-connectivity is often adopted for improving communication aspects such as latency, reliability and throughput. In the literature, different multi-connectivity schemes have been tested in industrial scenarios [8], [18]- [20]. In [18], the authors studied multi-connectivity for Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and the cost in throughput for other services such as Enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) services. ...
... This work focused on the latency performance for the mobility case when using the PD and best path switching solutions in an indoor factory. On the other hand, the authors of [20] presented a novel multi-connectivity solution that takes into account the QoS to dynamically select the links for PD. This scheme was evaluated with Wi-Fi 6 in terms of latency and throughput. ...
Industry 4.0 is being adopted by the manufacturing sector to improve the flexibility and reduce installation costs by the use of wireless connectivity. There is an open question of which wireless technology deployment should be used in the factory to fulfil the requirements for next-generation applications such as autonomous mobile robots. Wi-Fi technology is the most extended and easy to deploy, while the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) network has been designed to support these industrial needs. Therefore, it is important to compare both technologies from a performance point of view, especially under different load conditions and number of devices. The use of multi-connectivity between 5G and Wi-Fi can also be an option to fulfil the requirements for the most critical real-time applications. In this paper, we empirically measure the scalability of 5G, Wi-Fi and multi-connectivity in the “Aalborg University 5G Smart Production Lab” and compare them in terms of latency and packet loss with different packet sizes. We found that in general Wi-Fi obtains lower latencies but large tails in the distribution, with a higher packet loss compared to 5G. On the other hand, 5G latency is very consistent with bounded tails, and low packet loss is obtained. In terms of scalability, 5G scales better than Wi-Fi, the latter being very affected by the number of devices transmitting data. Finally, multi-connectivity showed an improved reliability and lower latencies in all evaluated cases.
