Abstract

In this paper we develop a simple, yet accurate, performance model to understand if and how evolutions of traditional cellular network protocols can be exploited to allow large numbers of devices to gain control of transmission resources in smart factory radio access networks. The model results shed light on the applicability of evolved access procedures and help understand how many devices can be served per base station. In addition, considering the simultaneous presence of different traffic classes, we investigate the effectiveness of prioritised access, exploiting access class barring techniques. Our model shows that, even with the sub-millisecond time slots foreseen in LTE Advanced Pro and 5G, a base station can accommodate at most few thousand devices to guarantee access latencies below 100 ms with high transmission success probabilities. This calls for a rethinking of wireless access strategies to avoid ultra-dense cell deployments within smart factory infrastructures.

Highlights

  • Factory automation, under the buzzwords Factories of the Future (FoF), or Smart Factories (SF), is a key pillar of the Industry 4.0 concept, and one of the key vertical sectors for 5G technologies [1], together with automotive, healthcare, energy, media and entertainment [2]. 5G classifies the most stringent performance requirements of this application domain in the use case family termed Tactile Internet / Automation since they require time-critical process optimisation to support zero-defect manufacturing

  • A request can move from stage i to i + 1 because of a collision, or any event that precludes the success of the RRC connection procedure: either the request is not decoded by the base stations (BSs), or the BS does not have resources to send an acknowledgement and decides to drop the request

  • To support our modelling choice, we performed a set of simple simulation experiments, comparing the interarrival time CDF generated by a Poisson process against the one produced by different numbers of sources

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Under the buzzwords Factories of the Future (FoF), or Smart Factories (SF), is a key pillar of the Industry 4.0 concept, and one of the key vertical sectors for 5G technologies [1], together with automotive, healthcare, energy, media and entertainment [2]. 5G classifies the most stringent performance requirements of this application domain in the use case family termed Tactile Internet / Automation since they require time-critical process optimisation to support zero-defect manufacturing. Investigating how the 5G technology can cope with an extremely demanding environment such as SF is very important, especially to determine the type and the density of base stations (BSs) that can meet the required KPI targets, together with the associated cost To accomplish such task, little exists in the literature that can help to understand the impact of those procedures needed to access resources in a cellular network under extreme operational conditions. A request can move from stage i to i + 1 because of a collision, or any event that precludes the success of the RRC connection procedure: either the request is not decoded by the BS, or the BS does not have resources to send an acknowledgement and decides to drop the request (we indicate with Θ the maximum number of requests the base station can acknowledge in each RACH interval τ ). The accuracy of such assumption will be later validated in the numerical evaluation section (see Fig. 4)

Structure of the request sojourn time
Analysis of random access operation
MODEL POSITIONING
NUMERICAL RESULTS
10 Sources 100 Sources
RELATED WORK
CONCLUSIONS
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