Flexible production processes and applications for Industry 4.0 expect a seamless, deterministic communication over scalable infrastructure networks that rely on a combination of wired and wireless technologies. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and 5G are considered key technologies to meet the communication requirements of Industry 4.0. To integrate 5G into TSN, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specified the 5G system (5GS) as Ethernet bridge, to exchange time synchronization and Quality of Service (QoS) requirement information between wired TSN entities and 5GS. QoS mapping between TSN and 5G is non-trivial and requires a deeper analysis of relevant parameters and QoS processing. In this paper, different solution approaches for QoS mapping between TSN and 5G are presented and discussed. The contribution covers fundamentals and prerequisites on the way to a 5G QoS model for TSN, which has not yet been addressed in 3GPP nor IEEE.

Industry 4.0 brings up new types of use cases, whereby mobile use cases play a significant role. These use cases have stringent requirements on both automation and communication systems that cannot be achieved with recent shop floor technologies. Therefore, novel technologies such as IEEE time-sensitive networking (TSN) and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) are being introduced. In addition, for the realization of mobile use cases, wireline technologies cannot be used and have to be replaced by wireless connections, which have to meet the high demands of the industrial landscape. Here, 5th generation wireless communication system (5G) is seen as a promising candidate. Especially encouraging and similarly challenging is the cooperative work of mobile robots, where particularly high demands on time synchronization arise. Therefore, this paper introduces a concept for the integration of TSN time synchronization (IEEE 802.1AS) conform with 5G to fulfill the requirements of these use cases. Furthermore, the paper describes a testbed for discrete manufacturing, consisting pre-dominantly of industrial equipment, in order to evaluate the presented approach.

The digitization of industrial automation processes calls for flexible, adaptable, and scalable communication solutions in order to enable the vision of a truly "cyber-physical system". In this context, IEEE Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), developed by the TSN task group of the IEEE 802.1 working group, receives particular interest as it defines mechanisms for the time-sensitive (i.e., deterministic) transmission of data over Ethernet networks. In order to enable novel use cases and further improve the efficiency of industrial automation, mobile communication solutions are needed. Here, the time-sensitive communications (TSC) service in 3GPP Release 16 aims to support applications requiring deterministic or isochronous communication with high reliability and availability, such as IEEE TSN and IETF DetNet, over 5G mobile networks. This paper briefly depicts the favorable deployment scenarios for an integrated 5G/TSN system in Industry 4.0 environments. It further describes the requirements in integrating a 5G system (5GS) with an IEEE TSN system and depicts the 3GPP integrated system architecture, which foresees to present the 5GS to the TSN system like any other TSN-aware bridge. Subsequently, the focus of this paper lies on presenting remaining challenges as well as solutions to a subset of these challenges, particularly focusing on radio access, core, and network management aspects as well as QoS mapping framework.

The increasing demand for highly customized products, as well as flexible production lines, can be seen as trigger for the “fourth industrial revolution”, referred to as “Industrie 4.0”. Current systems usually rely on wire-line technologies to connect sensors and actuators. To enable a higher flexibility such as moving robots or drones, these connections need to be replaced by wireless technologies in the future. Furthermore, this facilitates the renewal of brownfield deployments to address Industrie 4.0 requirements. This paper proposes representative use cases, which have been examined in the German Tactile Internet 4.0 (TACNET 4.0) research project. In order to analyze these use cases, this paper identifies the main challenges and requirements of communication networks in Industrie 4.0 and discusses the applicability of 5th generation wireless communication systems (5G).

Abstract Mobile broadband networks will face a tremendous growth in data traffic demand over the next 20 years. A key requirement for the evolution of radio access networks is the increase in the amount of spectrum and optimized spectrum usage, in order to meet future service demands. More efficient spectrum use will come with evolving technology features and novel spectrum sharing models. Candidates for technology improvements are higher order and massive MIMO systems, cooperative base stations and CoMP techniques, highly optimized resource allocation algorithms, network densification with inter-cell interference management and highly flexible carrier aggregation techniques to extend spectrum. In this paper, we will highlight carrier aggregation combined with flexible spectrum assignment and use of spectrum databases following novel licensing schemes. We give an overview of LSA activities, present a 3CA demonstration platform enabling the LSA concept and discuss its implementation constraints.

An LTE-Advanced Radio Access Network (RAN) would be able to activate an additional component carrier in a Licensed Spectrum Access (LSA) channel, allowing the mobile network operator (MNO) to boost capacity and data rates. But such a dynamic spectrum access strategy requires an effective method for estimating the impact of the LTA-Advanced RAN operation on the primary user and minimizing it. LTE-Advanced provides a useful feature, namely the minimization of drive test (MDT) reporting system, wherein the network collects measurement data performed by the user equipment. Each report provides position and signal strength information. In this paper, we compare the performance of some spatial interpolation methods that would be used to reconstruct the interference map of an LTE-Advanced RAN based on the MDT reports. In this way, the MNO can determine if an LSA channel could be used without potential harm to the primary user operation just by checking the estimated interference map. Furthermore, the performance of different interpolation methods for establishment of interference map is analyzed, when the MDT reports containing errors in the values or locations of the reported measurements. Estimation accuracy is also evaluated respect to spatial correlation.

Spectrum licensing schemes are subject to fixed allocation, little sharing and long term holding, which is leading to the current problem of false scarcity. Considering current spectrum allocation methodologies and given the exponential growth of traffic demand, spectrum scarcity becomes problematic since in the near future current radio access technologies will not be able to cope with this traffic demand increase anymore. Thus, new licensing schemes must be designed to enable sharing of spectrum frequency, so that rarely used spectrum channels can be reallocated dynamically between primary users and mobile services. Cognitive radio based dynamic spectrum access is foreseen as a solution to this intricate problem. Further, simple dynamic spectrum access schemes could be integrated into an LTE-Advanced mobile network, making use of carrier aggregation and the standardized user equipment measurement reports. In this paper, we focus on geographical division of spectrum for an LTE-Advanced network, where the spectrum is classified into Frequency/Location/Time bundles. These bundles work as independent tradeable units that can be aggregated and tailored to the needs of the participants in spectrum adjudication. Geographic locations are divided into a square grid, where an estimation of the Radio Environment Map based on propagation parameters is used to assess the sets of tradeable units assigned to a given mobile network operator. Furthermore we make an analysis of how spectrum exclusion areas can be characterized and defined in order to coexist with the operator's network.

With rapid growth of mobile users and developents of mobile equipments like cell phones, laptops and personal digits assistances (PDA), mobile networks have to meet dramatically increased service demands in the nearest future. The ever-increasing demands, such as the users expect to enjoy the service anywhere, anytime and the networks support a seamless mobility, driving the evolution of mobile networks at a fast pace. The next generation mobile network (LTE in 3GPP) is conducting research towards this goal. An IP protocol based flatter network architecture has been introduced in the next generation mobile networks (NGMN). In this network architecture, gateway (GW) is the only node which establishes a connection between RAN and external world. To provide capabilities of gateways catering for service demand at different stages, more advanced functions such as load balancing between gateways is proposed. Such mechanism will be used as a solution to avoid gateways congestion and optimize network performance for the future network. In this paper, based on the described flat architecture of the next generation mobile networks and some related concepts such as the pool of gateway, inter-GW load balancing approach has been introduced followed by performance evaluation. Simulation results show promising gains provided by the inter-GW load balancing mechanism for next generation systems.

Future cellular wireless networks based on MIMO-OFDM enable high data rates in outdoor scenarios. Limitations in coverage, especially at cell-edge, might be overcome by transmission over relays, which is therefore widely discussed for LTE-advanced networks. Here, a multi-hop relay node is placed at the cell-edge or in a coverage hole in order to compensate for the penetration path loss caused by buildings. Relay nodes can be deployed in two modes, either as amplify and forward or as decode and forward relay. The later system may benefit from independent link adaptation which is a key concept especially under fading conditions in outdoor broadband wireless. This paper reports on first multi-hop relaying field trials in the LTE downlink. These field trials were carried out in a single-cell, single sector urban outdoor environment within the Berlin LTE-advanced testbed. Results show that outdoor relaying is a key concept to deliver high data rates to the cell edge. Furthermore, results show that rates above 60 Mbps are achievable and outdoor relaying yields for a 300 m range extension. In addition, results show that multi-hop relaying provides cell-edge users with a minimum data rate of at least 20 Mbps which is mandatory, especially if QoS constraints have to be met.

The future cellular radio networks like 3G-LTE are based on an OFDMA physical layer. The duplex scheme is preferably frequency division (FDD) because of its advantages in long range. Huge area coverage in a cost-efficient way is important problem for the early deployment. Time after time the demand in densely populated areas will grow, so a higher cell capacity over the area is needed. The requirements are expensive to solve with a traditional cellular architecture, because a fibre line access will be needed at any base station location, which are sometimes only a few 100 meters apart. This paper deals with multihop operation as an option to improve the coverage as well as the capacity issue at low cost. Homogeneous relays act like base stations, but without the need of a cable or fibre access. They are simply fed by the same radio technology in their first hop. The contribution of this paper is especially the multihop operation in the FDD mode and performance results for the throughput on the MAC-layer. The results were obtained with an analytic model, numerically evaluated with Matlab.