At the core of digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is the objective to unlock data at multiple points of the production system and produce insights to improve and optimize all aspects of the business operations. Tremendous advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning make it possible to analyze a vast volume of the field and production data and translate them into optimization decisions. Real-time access to the data complements efficient machine learning inference for timely and actionable insights. Flexible and re-configurable manufacturing also demands high-performance, pervasive, and low-la-tency communication links supporting mobility of workers, devices, and robots. Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) introduced basic support for Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communication (urLLC) in Release-15 through intrinsic design features. Release-16 extends real-time capabilities of 5G NR to different verticals, addressing use cases in factory automation, the transport industry, and electrical power distribution. Wireless technologies such as 5G urLLC should co-exist with incumbent and emerging industrial Ethernet systems such as Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) in a heterogenous networking architecture. Hence, specification of interworking with TSN is also part of 3GPP Release-16. In this article, we discuss low-latency and high-reliability features supporting industrial automation, focusing on Release-16 design specifications. The interworking aspects with TSN and time synchronization accuracy limits are also highlighted, followed by performance evaluation of control and data traffic channels of 5G NR with respect to urLLC requirements.

Connectivity requirements for factory automation involve some of the strictest Quality of Service (QoS) targets via a combination of ultra-high reliability and low latency demands from the communication service. They form a significant fraction of use cases under Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) industry vertical in 5G New Radio (NR). In this paper, we present a latency-reliability analysis framework that highlights different system design and operation considerations for URLLC. Specifically, we focus on downlink (DL) multi-transmission point (multi-TP) coordination and/or transmission schemes in factory automation scenarios, and show the potential gains in terms of outage probability for a URLLC service requirement of 1 ms latency and 99.999% reliability.

This paper analyzes physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) for 5G New Radio (NR) technology defined as part of Rel-15 3GPP physical layer specifications. The particular combination of design elements makes NR PDCCH unique compared to the PDCCH or EPDCCH designs in LTE. We focus on the physical aspects of NR PDCCH structure and provide an in-depth summary of the design considerations, analysis of novel search space (SS) design options to better balance the PDCCH blind decoding (BD) and channel estimation capabilities, and performance evaluation of various transmission schemes and configurations supported by NR PDCCH. This study attests the flexibility and robustness of NR PDCCH design in addition to potential further enhancements for the scenarios with more stringent reliability requirements, e.g., URLLC applications.

In the 5th generation of mobile cellular systems, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is being considered as a potential candidate for uplink (UL) multiple access (MA) in addition to the basic orthogonal multiple access scheme in order to support various usage scenarios including small packet transmissions, support of a massive number of users , and low latency and high reliability services. In this paper, two simple multiple access schemes, low code rate spreading (LCRS) and short-sequence-based spreading multiple access (SSMA), with corresponding use of advanced receivers, are analyzed, demonstrating system capacity improvements compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme. The robustness and gain of non-orthogonal multiple access scheme over orthogonal approaches are maximized when the packet size is small and suitable code rate is guaranteed.

We propose an enhanced precision channel state acquisition scheme for downlink Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmission with a large number of transmit antennas at the base station. The proposed scheme is an attempt to harvest the Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter by incrementally improving the precision of the channel knowledge. We show how, in an LTE-Advanced system, CSI harvesting mechanism followed by the conventional Zero-Forcing BeamForming (ZFBF) results in improved MU-MIMO performance, relative to the current method for acquiring CSI at the transmitter. The proposed progressive CSI harvesting scheme is also shown to yield significant saving in terms of feedback overhead. The implications of the larger MIMO systems and higher MU-MIMO ranks, and sensitivity to higher mobility are also discussed.