# An Experimental Framework for 5G Wireless System Integration into Industry 4.0 Applications
## 4 Framework Applicability Example: 5G Autonomous Mobile Robots
### 5G-Connected Autonomous Mobile Robots
This specific route was chosen to ensure that the AMR was navigating across the multiple 5G cells and guarantee that a proper assessment of the attachment/re-attachment to multiple cells and the connection reliability in mobility conditions was done. The performance of the control of the AMR over 5G was compared to the one over different Wi-Fi configurations. The performance tests focused on two main different domains: control-loop latency performance and packet error rate. The results from the tests are displayed in Figure 10. Given the communication requirements of the AMR, with expected control loops every 1 s, all control-loops with latency higher than that will make the AMR stop and enter in a momentary outage. As indicated in the results, no outage was experienced for the 5G-integrated solution, which exhibited a reliable deterministic performance with median control-loop latency of 11 ms and lower than 25 ms at the 99.9 percentile (\(10^{-3}\)). This was, however, not the case for Wi-Fi 5/6, over which control-loop latencies higher than 1 s were experienced during 0.1-0.3% of the time in those cases where no frequency planning was considered (which resembles the typical Wi-Fi deployment situation in operational factories where the AMRs are expected to operate). During these outage occurrences, control-loop latencies close to up to 10 s were observed. These long control-loop latencies will keep the AMR stopped and non-operational for a few seconds every time they happen, which will have an impact of the underlying industrial production process in which AMRs are involved. The performance of the AMR over optimized Wi-Fi 6 and ideal frequency planning (i.e., dedicated spectrum channels per access point) was also observed to fulfill the control-loop requirements for the given use case. However, such performance was less deterministic than the one observed for the 5G-integrated solution. While a median control-loop latency, better than the 5G one, of 5 ms was observed; the value at the 99.9 percentile is increased to over 0.5 s, illustrating the higher reliability of 5G as compared to Wi-Fi. Further, the 5G-integrated solution experienced no packet loss, while in the Wi-Fi case, the PER was 0.4-0.26%. Figure 10: CCDF of the AMR-FM control-loop latencies for the different Wi-Fi and 5G network configuration explored in the performance measurement test. Figure 9: **(a)** Architecture of the 5G-integrated AMR solution including the AMR, WMAGW, 5G network infrastructure and AMR fleet manager controller. **(b)** Picture of the 5G-integrated AMR solution deployed at the lab for the performance testing over the private 5G network and benchmarking with Wi-Fi 6. **(c)** Lab plan overview including the location of the 5G base stations and Wi-Fi 6 access points, as well as the measurement route followed to test the performance of the AMR in realistic mobility conditions. * Once it was verified that it is possible to operate AMRs over 5G, the next step would be to look into potential optimizations. Based on the experimental results and the practical observations done along the different operational steps, the potential areas of optimization for the 5G-integrated solution could be: the parametrization of the 5G network configuration to optimize the control-loop latency and reduce the tails of the distribution, or the re-design of the AMR communication schemes to make them more efficient and scalable when operated over wireless in general, or over 5G in particular. By completion of the operational flow, it was demonstrated the 5G-integration of AMRs. Apart from the commented optimizations, having 5G-connected AMRs opens for new possibilities within the same application ecosystem, such as making use of the 5G capacity and contained latency to migrate some of the intelligence from the AMR to the 5G mobile edge-cloud (MEC).