German test and assurance company Rohde & Schwarz has combined with Germany’s Industrial Radio Lab (IRL) in Dresden to investigate industrial 5G for mobile robots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs), among other Industry 4.0 use cases.
Rohde & Schwarz said it has provided network scanners to IRL Dresden, one of four regional research and development centres in Germany investigating wireless technologies under the Industrial Radio Lab Germany (IRLG) brand, for distributed real-time radio spectrum and interference monitoring. It said the pair will “explore reliable and resilient wireless technologies for industrial applications”.
It said industrial 5G, particularly with mid-term deployments of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), specified in 3GPP Release 16 and scheduled to make an appearance in the next few years, must be monitored closely to meet the searching requirements certain industrial use cases will make of it. These requirements will feature, notably, in private networking setups, in various ringfenced industrial sites, it said.
“As with any wireless system, the communication link is subject to potential interference on the deployed spectrum bands,” it stated. Its network scanners will enable researchers at IRL Dresden to gather data about how to detect, locate, and prevent interference, and keep a local spectrum band clear for reliable wireless connectivity, it said.
Norman Franchi, project lead at IRL Dresden, said: “The capabilities to cope with predictable as well as unpredictable disturbances and to provide appropriate self-optimization and self-healing mechanisms are still insufficient. Automated and reliable methods based on real-time measurements and AI analysis to detect, localize and avoid unintentional self-interference as well as intentional interference like jamming are becoming increasingly important and challenging.”
He added: “This is especially true in dynamic industrial use cases and communications scenarios. The goal of the cooperation is to analyze and evaluate the requirements on the measurement sensors and network, and to derive which real-time performance can be achieved.”
Anne Stephan, vice president for mobile network testing at Rohde & Schwarz, said: “Industrial campus network deployments, whether based on private spectrum or provided through network slices from a public operator, generally establish a demanding use case scenario. By partnering with a leading research institute like the IRL Dresden we not only support fundamental research, but gain first-hand insights that we can use to adapt our leading mobile network testing solutions for Industry 4.0”
The IRLG works with enterprises and organisations in pursuit of a “knowledge transfer towards a digital society”. IRL Dresden focused on “detection, localization, and mitigation of interference and improving network resilience through real-time measurements of time-variant channels and cooperative spectrum sensing”.
