# An Experimental Framework for 5G Wireless System Integration into Industry 4.0 Applications
## 2 Learnings from Industry and Related Framework Design Considerations  
In order to guarantee that our proposed 5G system integration framework is aligned with the needs of industry, the main learnings from four years of numerous conversations and visits to different Danish factories are analyzed and considered directly into the design:  
* Design consideration: a common language and understanding needs to be established. Each factory and operational teams are different from others so, ideally, this should be done on an individual factory and use case basis. Benchmarking the performance of the wireless solution, not only over 5G, but also over other technologies such as Wi-Fi should help in improving the understanding of the different wireless operational possibilities. In this case, disseminating performance test results to manufacturing experts is an important aspect to consider. * Deploying a wireless system is typically not considered in the business models, and is generally perceived as a cost and not as benefit. Moreover, due to the lack of experience with wireless communications, in most cases, a large degree of skepticism about the reliability, capabilities and potential of these technologies was detected.
- Design consideration: In order to build trust and convince the manufacturing industry about the suitability and the potential benefits of wireless applied to production, live demonstrations of wireless-operated industrial use cases are encouraged. This could take form of trials in factories or demos in lab environments, where wireless-integrated production concepts are shown to manufacturing experts. * In general, current wired industrial factory control networks are not optimized for direct integration with wireless technologies. Integration gaps range from a non-optimal topology, to the use of non-IP traffic or transmission modes, such as broadcast, that may not be directly enabled/supported by wireless technologies. To fully exploit the benefits of wireless applied to industrial production, a re-architecture of such control networks will be an essential step.
- Design consideration: hardware and software prototypes should be flexible enough to cope with modern (IP-based) and old (non-IP-based) communication protocols. Furthermore, the prototypes should be flexible enough to support different control architectures and modes of operation such as infrastructure mode (where end-devices communicate to a centralized entity or controller) and device-to-device communication (where the end-devices can communicate directly among themselves). * There is a huge hype among the manufacturing industry about cloud control and cloud monitoring, which lead to a noticeable tendency of installing such systems within their production equipment without a proper performance impact assessment, as high capacity communication links available from each device to the cloud are taken for granted. However, this might not always be true, especially when operating over wireless, which could lead to some operational problems.
- Design consideration: a proper data traffic analysis should be done before proceeding with the integration of an application with wireless in order to identify all potential communication flows in a given system. Further, a performance evaluation should be done after the wireless solution is deployed, to ensure operational correctness. * Legacy is extremely important. Not all companies will have the chance to invest in the most advanced solutions, but still introducing a few wireless components for specific communication needs might result in a considerable gain for them.
- Design consideration: hardware and software prototypes should be able to transport over wireless legacy communication protocols that are conceived for industrial wired setups.