Reliability and Availability Enhancements of the 5G Connectivity for Factory Automation Ultrareliable lowlatency communication (URLLC) differentiates the fifth generation mobile network (5G) by allowing it to natively address the needs of missioncritical machine type communication, thereby enabling a wide range of use cases. This work selects industrial automation as a target use case for very strict URLLC requirements. By means of simulation, we study how reliability and availability of the 5G connectivity can be improved using multiple transmissionreception points (TRxPs) in an interference limited scenario. A factory scenario with mobile robots connected via a 5G network with two indoor cells is selected, as mobility is one of the main drivers of the need for wireless connectivity, and is also a major challenge to reliability. The results indicate that differences in design alternatives have a significant impact. It is evident that the best design choices for the TRxPs in a given factory significantly enhance communication service reliability and availability, even when no retransmissions are allowed due to very tight latency requirements. The solution can additionally increase capacity in terms of the number of mobile robots supported in the factory, for a desired level of reliability. We conclude that first, the number of TRxPs that simultaneously transmit to a user (referred to as a cluster) cannot be increased indefinitely, as this could increase interference and worsen signaltointerferenceandnoise ratio (SINR). We observe that increasing the number of TRxPs deployed in a cell, while keeping the cluster size small, has a positive effect. Finally, we demonstrate that the positioning of the TRxPs around the factory plays an import role. The best observed design choice is to place many TRxPs around each cell, with only one or two TRxPs transmitting simultaneously to a user. Placing the TRxPs at a large distance from each other increases spatial diversity and the likelihood of improving the received signal, and distancing the TRxPs of one cell from the other cellxe2x80x99s TRxPs limits interference.

Demonstrating the Impact of LTE Communication Latency for Industrial Applications This paper assesses the performance of a private LTE wireless network in an industrial automation setup. Our goal is to study the impact of communication latency in a robot arm position control application when the position feedback signal is transmitted via a commercial LTE wireless link. An Ethernet link scenario is considered as our benchmark. We show that even under very specific conditions (no network load, high signal power), the wireless link cannot achieve a satisfactory performance. The proposed demonstration provides a simple visualization of how LTE network latency disturbs the robot behavior, leading to undesired overshoots, oscillations and even stopping its movements. These results demonstrate that even a private LTE network is still incapable of providing the low latency required by industry automation applications, which shall be incorporated in the upcoming 5G wireless systems.