# 5G Support for Industrial IoT Applications--Challenges, Solutions, and Research Gaps
## 4 5G Support for Industrial IoT Applications Utilizing Robotics
### Industry 4.0  
The key capabilities of 5G (supporting eMBB, URLLC, and MMTC) act as an enabler for Industry 4.0. According to [19], Industry 4.0 is defined as the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. Its main research domains include cyberphysical systems, the Internet of Things, cloud computing and cognitive computing. Industry 4.0 creates what has been called a \"smart factory\". Within the modular structured smart factories, cyberphysical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions. The current 4G/3G limitations can be described as reliability of wireless connections, energy consumption of devices, end to end delay, supporting extreme density of devices. 5G removes these limitations, enabling use-cases that were not possible before. These can be grouped into the following categories: Time Critical and Reliable Processes (e.g., real-time monitoring, vision controlled robot), Non-Time Critical Communication (logistic process involving assets and goods, quality control process or data acquisition), and Remote Control of Factory (remote workers, augmented reality). The authors of [20] discuss the application of 5G communication technology in an industrial environment as 5G offers characteristics essential for industrial use-cases such as robustness, ultralow latency, high data rates, and massive number of devices. The paper introduces an Industrial Demonstrator Platform consisting of a mobile robot and ten production modules. In this work it is shown that 5G can be applied in a real-world application industrial environment with heterogeneous data sources. The capabilities of 5G communications show great potential for certain industrial applications as an alternative for wire-based transmission. When broadening the view for 5G for industrial applications, the authors of [21] first identified more advantages of 5G than the main three (eMMB, URLLC, and mMTC): Mobility support, Energy efficiency, Security, Economy of scale, and core networking changes: Softwarization and virtualization, SDN, and Mesh networks. The paper further lists several use cases and technical requirements for the main three capabilities: Infrastructure retrofit, Mobile robots, Inbound logistics for manufacturing, flexible and modular assembly area, plug-and-produce, Massive wireless sensor network, and process monitoring. After this, the paper then proposes a communication network architecture that can fulfill the requirements of the listed use cases, and integrates it into reference architectures for Industry 4.0 (Reference Architectural Model Industrie 4.0) and IIoT (Industrial Internet Reference Architecture). The authors of [22] demonstrate the application of 5G communication technology in robotics, how the URLLC capabilities of the 5G can facilitate a distributed robotics control system. The proposed approach allows offloading of time-critical, computational exhaustive operations onto a distributed node architecture such as a cloud server using 5G URLLC communication between the cloud and the robot. This approach is demonstrated using a real-world application performed by a mobile robot. Digital production, product lifecycle management, and supply chain management are the three pillars of the collaborative European project, Productive4.0 [4]. The Arrowhead Framework [23; 24] is used throughout various use-cases here, in order to provide interoperability, integrability and ergonomic engineering capabilities. The real-life measurements of Arrowhead-based local automation clouds [25] show that although NB-IoT outperforms Cat-3 or Cat-M1 infrastructures under harsh conditions [26], LTE-based technologies cannot satisfy industrial requirements. Even QCI-prioritization cannot help the LTE-enabled end-devices to communicate with less than 10 ms delay (not to mention jitter) [27].