Factory Radio Design of a 5G Network in Offline Mode
Journal article, 2021

The manufacturing industry is connecting people and equipment with new digital technologies, enabling a more continuous stream of data to represent processes. With more things connected, the interest in a connectivity solution that can support communication with high reliability and availability will increase. The fifth generation of telecommunication, i.e., 5G has promising features to deliver this, but the factory environment introduces new challenges to ensure reliable radio coverage. This will require efficient ways to plan the Factory Radio Design prior to installation. 3D laser scanning is used at an ever-increasing rate for capturing the spatial geometry in a virtual representation to perform layout planning of factories. This paper presents how to combine 3D laser scanning and physical optics (PO) for planning the Factory Radio Design of a cellular Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network (5G) in a virtual environment. 3D laser scanning is applied to obtain the spatial data of the factory and the virtual representation serves as the environment where PO computation techniques can be performed. The simulation result is validated in this paper by comparison to measurements of the installed network and empirical propagation models. The results of the study show promising opportunities to simulate the radio coverage in a virtual representation of a factory environment.

Long-Term Evolution (LTE)

5G

Industry 4.0

Factory Radio Design

Smart Manufacturing (SM)

Physical Optics (PO)

3D Laser Scanning

Author

Maja Bärring

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Oleg Iupikov

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Andres Alayon Glazunov

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

University of Twente

Marianna Ivashina

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Jonatan Berglund

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Björn Johansson

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Johan Stahre

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Fredrik Harrysson

Ericsson

Ulrika Engström

Ericsson

Martin Friis

SKF

IEEE Access

2169-3536 (ISSN) 21693536 (eISSN)

Vol. 9 23095-23109 3055941

5G-Enabled Manufacturing (5GEM)

VINNOVA (2015-06755), 2015-11-16 -- 2018-07-13.

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Computer Systems

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Production

DOI

10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3055941

More information

Latest update

3/16/2021