Evaluation of Control-to-Control Communication in Industrial 5G Network

Abstract

Ethernet-based industrial communication standards are dominating the communication landscape in factories. With the transition towards more flexible and wireless solutions, there is a strong interest to enable existing wired applications, such as control-to-control (C2C) use cases, over a wireless network. In this work, we investigate an example C2C application and validate its performance when operated over 5G. For this purpose, we present measurement results taken from a 5G standalone (SA) deployment in an operational factory. Our results show that 5G can replace existing wired solution, but at the cost of a lowered C2C application efficiency due to longer network latency. We furthermore investigate the impact of cross-traffic to the C2C application and effects of traffic prioritization.