# Performance of 5G Trials for Industrial Automation
###### Abstract  
Wireless- and 5G-enabled industrial automation is expected to include a plethora of different applications with a wide variety of requirements. In this article, evaluations are undertaken for the deployment of 5G in realistic industrial production environments with realistic deployment settings. Both deployments using commercial 5G systems and a 5G prototype system including pre-commercial and standard compliant URLLC functionality have been investigated. Systematic latency and reliability measurements were performed, over the air and in live networks, for different packet sizes, different devices, and networks with different capabilities (at different sites) to characterize the expected performance. The results indicate that today's 5G latency performance significantly depends on packet size, transmission direction (uplink or downlink), and network configuration as well as on the end device's design and capabilities. Our over-the-air measurements also empirically show that 5G technology and future networks have the capability of providing one-way latency of around 1 ms in both uplink and downlink for the various packet sizes tested. It is concluded that the requirements for very low latencies can be achieved with high reliability guarantees, as required in some of the most stringent industrial IoT applications. 20221142122114221142  
So far, only a few 5G over-the-air (OTA) latency results have been reported for industrial deployments. Some of the recent 5G OTA latency measurement results that have been reported [3; 4; 5] were performed in non-industrial environments and consider traffic profile types that are closer to eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband) or V2X (Vehicle-to-everything). While some published work [3] provides significant insights into the real-world performance of 5G networks, aspects such as tests in real production halls with traffic profiles derived from real use-cases, RAN configuration effects, and the empirical benefits of using URLLC features have not been covered. A comparison of Wi-Fi 6 with 5G focuses on simplified testing and does not consider industry-application traffic profiles or deployment in a realistic production environment [6]. While the paper concludes in favor of 5G when it comes to coverage and resilience, scalability aspects or 5G URLLC features were been empirically evaluated. Furthermore, using higher percentiles than the 95 th (which is more suitable for eMBB-type applications) would be of interest, especially when considering the industry reliability requirements for mission-critical industry applications [6]. Often, round trip times (RTT) are measured for the latency or delay characterization of a 5G network. However, industrial traffic is typically characterized as one-way periodic traffic. Since uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) delays are different and can be optimized or configured differently, RTT measurements are not always representative of industrial scenarios. This paper contributes to the understanding of the practical aspects of performance in 5G deployments for industries by presenting results from systematic and comprehensive OTA latency measurements. The measurements were conducted in real industry deployments with traffic profiles derived from actual industry use cases, and latency performance results to the 99.9 th percentile are presented, separating UL and DL performance. The tests compare different network features, including RAN configurations, use of over-the-top redundancy schemes, as well as the use of URLLC capabilities. Additionally, device-dependency aspects on the end-to-end latency performance are highlighted. The rest of the article is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the use case requirements and gives an overview of the use case implementations at the different trial sites. In Section 3, a brief overview of the 5G deployments at the different 5G-SMART trial sites is given.