Experiments with industrial robotics systems over an indoor 5G-NSA mmWave deployment

Abstract

Use of high frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) bands as the communication solution for a variety of new verticals has been of interest over the past several years. While the inherent range limitation of mmWave bands make them the perfect candidate for building localized private indoor networks, transmissions at these high frequencies are also susceptible to absorption losses. Hence, despite the availability of large bandwidths, there has been a relatively slow uptake of these bands for licensed services. To address this, we explore the feasibility of mmWave by experimentally validating the performance of closed-loop control applications with indoor mobility requirements over hybrid combinations of wired and 5G networks. Our experiments, executed over an indoor non-standalone (NSA) 5G deployment at 28GHz, revealed comparable performance of industrial robotics systems when communicating over 5G mmWave or Ethernet.