Why 5G makes sense in an industrial environment

5G technology can reduce costs relating to cabling infrastructure, support mobile units like autonomous carts or moving AGVs, and increasing flexibility in industrial applications.  In manufacturing, there is an increasing demand for custom made products, which drives a trend towards more flexible production sites.  With 5G, new production cells can be introduced without the need for cables. The new installations do not need to be at the same site, since 5G can support connectivity to remote sites. That allows connectivity of dispersed factories across different locations.

A brief introduction to the TSN world

The main goal of a Time Sensitive Network is to provide deterministic services over IEEE 802 (Ethernet) wired networks. This means guaranteed packet transport with bounded latency, low packet delay variation, and low packet loss. The features can be enabled for specific data streams in a network that also handles best effort type of traffic, for example industrial networks, where data streams from different applications have varying timing requirements.

TSN standards can be applied in many verticals, for example industrial and automotive networks. IEEE is developing a so called dual logo standard defining TSN profiles for industrial automation: IEC/IEEE 60802, together with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).The below figure summarizes the different TSN components and corresponding IEE 802.1 standards.