Читать книгу Shaping Future 6G Networks - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Each production facility and industrial area is a different use case with particular requirements. Industrial deployments, particularly in manufacturing, tend to have equipment and machinery with life cycles that extend over a decade. Therefore, the introduction and use of cellular networks for applications with stringent requirements is a long and gradual process that has started in dedicated deployments for a well‐defined set of application. Thus, the integration with existing equipment, wired solutions, and radio access technologies (RATs) will still be required for many years into the future to ensure backward compatibility and improve overall performance.

As front‐runners expand the applications relying on cellular networks, more complex deployments and applications will emerge. For example: dynamic deployments with URLLC requirements for exploration, mining activities, and wide area monitoring of pipelines, electric grids, and other critical infrastructures and the need for robots to perform cooperative maneuvers that require high precision and coordination. Moreover, for the factory cases with extreme performance requirements, it will be crucial to support URLLC in factory floors with moving objects and reshuffling manufacturing units. Digital twins (discussed in detail in Section 2.3.3) will also play an important role for industrial applications, where a digital twin replicates a real‐world object in a digitized environment, which would enable the evaluation of performance and outcomes of industrial applications in safe, digital environments before a solution is deployed in the real world.

In 6G we will see improved solutions to support multiple connectivity in the same deployment and application to improve reliability and performance through link diversity and aggregation. While some solutions are already available in 5G such as dual connectivity and carrier aggregation, 6G will cover the need to support and aggregate multiple RATs maintaining the latency and reliability requirements of industrial applications, which will also provide additional access to local spectrum. In addition, the integration of time‐sensitive networking (TSN) and deterministic networking (DetNet) standards that started in 5G will be fully utilized to support deterministic data transmission over cellular networks. Finally, network exposure and integration with cloud capabilities are key factors to enable the expansion of 6G for industrial applications, since they will enhance the network capability management and provide support for real‐time applications while keeping sensitive operational data on cloud deployments that are kept secured.