Broadly, IIoT refers to devices and equipment in industrial settings that have been fitted with sensors and other instrumentation, and then networked together to gather and share data, and to carry out connected operations.
These networks are both wired and wireless and often consist of multiple types of communication technologies – for example, industrial SMS and other computer network protocols such as fieldbus systems.
However, 5G promises to revolutionise IIoT and help companies increase their productivity. According to Digital Catapult, the UK’s leading advanced digital technology innovation centre, 5G has the potential to contribute up to £15.7bn a year to the UK economy by 2025.
Main advantages
The headline features of this fifth generation of communications technology are super-fast data rates, ultra-low latency with only a one millisecond delay between devices communicating with one another, and vastly increased network capacity.
As a result, 5G offers advantages for IIoT that other wireless communication technologies do not. Dritan Kaleshi, head of 5G technology at Digital Catapult, explained: “Firstly, 5G is secure by design, meaning the network operations themselves are secure,” he says. “It’s a managed network as compared to other kinds of wireless networks in use.”
There is a higher guarantee of the reliability and the timeliness of communications through the network, he added. Finally: “5G offers a networking system that has the capability to support multiple types of devices – such as high-quality inspection cameras and micro switch sensors – that are all transmitting data simultaneously.
“Taken together, all of these features provide the support for IIoT to move away from purely sensing networks, which it is mostly used for today, towards actuation. In other words, to close the loop for the control systems.”
For example, 5G can enable predictive maintenance, which requires large numbers of sensors and high network availability to allow for realtime feedback of what is happening in an industrial setting. In a project carried out by the Worcestershire 5G Consortium, this has already successfully been trialled at the Worcester Bosch factory.
“The result was that, instead of doing proactive maintenance, shutting down the factory, they could move to more reactive maintenance by doing predictive analysis based on the data that was able to be collected over a 5G network. Just this one operation resulted in about a 1% productivity growth for the factory,” said Kaleshi.
This is just one use case; there is a wide range of others that 5G can address. But
the biggest barrier is getting manufacturers onboard with 5G because there is an initial scepticism. To understand what these barriers are, Kaleshi, with Digital Catapult’s 5G in Manufacturing Working Group, produced a research paper last July called “Made in 5G,” which outlines the main challenges to 5G adoption.
“As part of this research we carried out workshops with manufacturers to understand their views of adopting 5G in order to support their digital transformation. One of the key things that came through was that there was little awareness of the capabilities of 5G technology,” said Kaleshi.
This prompted Digital Catapult to create a programme that could showcase 5G’s capabilities through real-life examples in a bid to incentivise companies to adopt 5G. Launched together with Ericsson at the end of 2019, the Industrial 5G Accelerator programme will work with manufacturing companies to produce test cases proving 5G’s potential in boosting productivity and increasing efficiency.
United front
“The goal of the accelerator is to bring together large players in manufacturing and system integrators with companies that can provide digital solutions with 5G technology, in this case from Ericsson, and to measure how they can improve the performance, sustainability and all the costs of operation of different manufacturing processes,” explained Kaleshi.
It’s been a long time coming but 5G is due to be rolled out in earnest later this year when 3GPP, a standards organisation that develops protocols for mobile telephony, releases the next phase of 5G standards – Release-17 (Rel-17). “The features coming out with Rel-17 will be able to support IIoT and so we anticipate that any deployment of 5G in any meaningful way is probably going to be seen in the next two to four years. And Digital Catapult is here to support companies as they embark on this exciting journey,” said Kaleshi.
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