Abstract
Factory automation is one of the use cases for 5G-and-beyond mobile networks where strict requirements in terms of latency, availability and reliability are required. In this paper, we investigate the potentials of massive MIMO in delivering those promises for industrial automation. Namely, communications between actuators (ACs) and Access Points (APs) inside an industrial scenario is considered and different transmission modes are compared: joint transmission (JT) where the distributed antennas are used to communicate with each AC, cell-free transmission (CFT) where all the ACs are served by all APs, single AP transmission (SAT) where each AC is served by only one AP, and user-centric transmission (UCT) where each AC is served by a subset of APs. A power control strategy, aimed at maximizing the minimum signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), is also introduced. Numerical results, shown in terms of downlink SINR and achievable rate, evaluated using the final block length capacity formula (FBLC), demonstrate that the use of distributed antenna setting and of power control bring substantial performance improvements in terms of reliability and latency.
Highlights
I N THE recent past, the use of wireless communications in factory automation has attracted a lot of interest in the scientific community [1]–[4]
This has led to the concept of ultra reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) [5], [6], which are instrumental to the development of new applications such as autonomous driving, remote control of drones, and wireless control of actuators (ACs) in factories
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has already defined different indoor industrial scenarios, with strict requirements on the latency [7], and several research groups worldwide are addressing the design of URLLC systems
Summary
I N THE recent past, the use of wireless communications in factory automation has attracted a lot of interest in the scientific community [1]–[4]. This has led to the concept of ultra reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) [5], [6], which are instrumental to the development of new applications such as autonomous driving, remote control of drones, and wireless control of actuators (ACs) in factories To this end, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has already defined different indoor industrial scenarios, with strict requirements on the latency [7], and several research groups worldwide are addressing the design of URLLC systems. The authors addressed the problem of link adaptation (LA), considering the block error rate (BLER) as KPI and evaluating different transmission modes, beamformers, with varying number of APs and ACs. That paper focused the attention to a target BLER of 10−5, which is an extremely low value, required in the URLLC. X is the norm of X, X:,n indicates the n-th column of matrix X
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