5G and beyond networks can facilitate the digital transformation of manufacturing and support more flexible and reconfigurable factories with ubiquitous mobile connectivity. This requires integrating 5G networks with industrial networks that increasingly rely on TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) to support deterministic communications with bounded latencies. Deterministic communications are critical for many industrial applications, but 5G does not natively support deterministic communications. To address this limitation, this study proposes the coordination of the 5G and TSN schedulers and presents a novel 5G configured grant scheduling scheme to support TSN traffic. The scheme uses information about the characteristics of the TSN traffic (packet size, periodicity, and arrival time) to coordinate its scheduling decisions with the TSN scheduler. The study demonstrates that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art in the capacity to support multiple TSN traffic flows with different periodicities.
Factories are evolving towards digitalized data-based ecosystems under the paradigm of the Industry 4.0 where new industrial services allow the implementation of more robust, resilient and customized manufacturing systems. Such services (e.g., digital twins, extended reality or c…
Teleoperated driving (ToD) can support autonomous driving under complex or unexpected traffic scenarios that an autonomous vehicle may not understand or be able to handle. In ToD, autonomous vehicles transmit video feeds and perception data to the remote control center. The opera…
5G and beyond networks will support the digitalization of smart manufacturing thanks to their capacity to simultaneously serve different types of traffic with distinct QoS requirements. This can be achieved using Network Slicing that creates different logical network partitions (…
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) extends Ethernet with deterministic communication for time-critical applications such as industrial automation, in-vehicle networks, and cyber-physical systems. However, realizing TSN behavior without dedicated hardware is difficult. During design…
Network slicing is a novel 5G paradigm that exploits the virtualization and softwarization of networks to create different logical network instances over a common network infrastructure. Each instance is tailored for specific Quality of Service (QoS) profiles so that network slic…
Reliable, low-latency communication is critical for real-time monitoring and control in modern Smart Grids (SGs). The emergence of 5G networks, with enhanced reliability, significantly lower latency, and native support for massive machine-type communication, offers strong potenti…