How much imagination can 5g network bring to industry?

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2020 is not only the year of outbreak, but also the first year of5gcommercial operation.5G, as the key of a new round of industrial revolution, according to the characteristics of ultra-high bandwidth, low latency and ultra large connection, will have a significant impact on human society. The first is to meet the needs of digital life, such as high-definition video, virtual reality VR and AR of augmented reality; the second is to meet the needs of digital society, such as smart city, environmental monitoring, intelligent agriculture, etc.; the third is the digital industrial demand, remote control and automatic driving of the factory.

Ubiquitous demand and rigid demand

As we all know, the industrial control network and management network of the traditional manufacturing plant belong to the internal network. We can understand it as a closed network, after all, the outside world is inaccessible. With the spread of the concept of industry 4.0, the development and application of domestic intelligent manufacturing, the factory needs internal network and external network for interconnection. From the actual situation, the manufacturers of textile, toys, food packaging and other industries tend to develop in the direction of flat internal communication network and functional architecture.

Industry insiders said that the existing industrial wireless solutions can not meet the needs of intelligent factories, and the only hope is5G, while some traditional factories have to adopt the industrial scenario of wireless communication when they are transforming and upgrading. For example, it is very inconvenient to reconstruct the old factory wiring; the production sites in oil production, oil and gas pipelines and other fields are too far away, as well as the operation sites with poor environment such as corrosion and salt fog.

How can5gmake production and manufacturing more optimized?

Since it is industry 4.0, it is different from labor-intensive production and manufacturing. The use of robots and the collaboration between machines are the main scenes. The traditional industrial communication adopts the master-slave mode, and realizes the communication between the machine and the machine through the main control equipment such as PLC. The application of5gwill greatly improve the communication between machines and make them more efficient.

In terms of factory logistics,5Gmakes it possible for logistics distribution vehicles in the park and plant area to realize automatic driving. In terms of remote operation and maintenance of large-scale manufacturing equipment,5gcan transmit more unstructured data, such as video, which can quickly understand the situation of the industrial site, and can quickly feedback the situation when operating the machine. In the future, no or few people factories need a lot of on-site data for decision-making support. The characteristics of ultra-high bandwidth, low delay and super large connection can effectively solve the problem of flexible manufacturing.

The demand of 5G communication for industrial application

For industrial applications, transmission rate and bandwidth are not the only determinants. It can be applied to industrial network, and its performance index needs to have certainty, real-time, availability and reliability. The end-to-end transmission delay of the communication system has the maximum limit value. The system processes and responds to the external things in a limited time, which is certainty and real-time. Certainty and real-time complement each other. Both of them indicate that the data transmission time in industrial network is determinable and predictable.

Industrial site is a very rigorous system. In production, under given conditions, the ability of the machine to be in a certain state and perform the required functions within a predetermined time or time interval is extremely important, which is related to the cost of production and manufacturing, that is, the availability of5Gnetwork in industrial applications. Thirdly, reliability, that is, the probability that the transmission message can reach the final destination completely and undamaged within the acceptable delay.

The industrial site environment is generally relatively poor, such as high temperature, humidity, dust, electromagnetic interference, etc. It is easy to lead to equipment operation and communication quality instability, thus affecting production and manufacturing. In other words, when5Gis applied to the industrial field, the network itself needs high anti-interference. In addition, the demand for5gin industrial applications also has security. The leakage of factory data is fatal to itself.