How far has Industrial 5G already advanced in industry?

5G in industry is currently on its way from theory to practice. While the main focus in recent years has been on basic work, standardization and testing, it is now primarily about building an associated ecosystem, developing corresponding products and solutions and, associated with this, gradually implementing 5G-based use cases in practice. As the world's leading industrial alliance for Industrial 5G, the 5G-ACIA has actively driven and shaped these developments from the outset and is now also playing a central role in broad market development.

Is the technology already widely available to build 5G networks in industry?

Many important foundations are already in place. For example, private 5G networks, which can be set up and operated by companies themselves or with partners, are now state of the art and this development is also being supported by regulatory changes in more and more countries. There is also a steadily growing number of optimized network infrastructure solutions that have been specially adapted to the needs of the industry, for example in terms of integration into existing IT infrastructures and ease of use. In addition, the number of available end devices is growing continuously, which also includes industrial-grade routers in particular, which enable existing plants and systems to be retrofitted quite easily.

For which companies does it make sense to use 5G in their production environment?

Thanks to the intensive work of the 5G-ACIA and its members, many important functionalities that specifically address the needs of industrial applications have been standardized in the 5G standard. This ranges from support for latency- and real-time-critical applications to the integration of 5G with TSN and high-precision positioning methods based on the 5G network infrastructure. The specified functions are now gradually being implemented in the chipsets and infrastructure components, but not all of them are yet fully available. As things stand today, 5G is therefore particularly well suited to the efficient realization of good network coverage (usually with significantly fewer radio access points than would be required with technologies such as WiFi) and highly reliable communication with sophisticated QoS management to support very different applications via the same infrastructure. The first TSN features are also already available. We therefore currently see large companies in particular as early adopters, as well as companies that are faced with the task of reliably illuminating large or difficult areas using radio technology, such as in ports, mining, the process industry, etc. In the future, however, we continue to assume that 5G will play a central role in almost all sectors and industries.

Together with TSN and OPC UA, 5G is regarded as a key technology for a fully networked value chain. What is the current status of linking the standards?

5G, TSN and OPC UA are indeed three key technologies on the way to Industry 4.0 and I would add Edge Computing, Digital Twins and AI/ML for the sake of completeness. Within the 5G-ACIA, we have been working intensively on all of these building blocks and, in particular, have examined the relevant integration aspects in detail. Some of this work has also been summarized in publicly available white papers and has resulted in corresponding standardization contributions. For example, 5G natively supports important TSN functions and standards, such as IEEE 802.1AS for time synchronization and IEEE 802.1Q for traffic prioritization. From an application perspective, a complete 5G system can thus appear like a logical TSN switch, which of course makes it very easy to integrate such a "TSN-over-5G" system. In the case of OPC UA, the 5G-ACIA has worked very closely and constructively with the OPC Foundation to address specific integration aspects. Here too, the various technologies can be linked together very well.

What specific use cases or testbeds already exist and which ones will you show visitors to the SPS?

There are currently more than 10 different testbeds within the 5G-ACIA, which address various application areas from robotics and semiconductor manufacturing to applications in intralogistics. In addition, the testbeds have different technological focuses, such as 5G-based indoor localization, TSN support, Open RAN, etc. Apart from this, there are of course many independent testbeds that are set up and operated by individual members or other companies. At the SPS, interested visitors can find out about the current status of our testbeds and other activities from the 5G-ACIA.

5G-ACIA is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. What milestones have been achieved so far?

We did indeed celebrate our fifth anniversary in April and look back with some pride on what we have achieved so far. After starting with 26 founding members in 2018, the 5G-ACIA has quickly developed into the world's leading organization for Industrial 5G and now has more than 100 members from all over the world, representing almost the entire value chain. The fact alone that we have been able to build numerous bridges between the OT industry and ICT industry and establish a common language is a complete success. The same applies to the development of private 5G networks and the strong consideration of industrial use cases and requirements in standardization at 3GPP. At the same time, we are not quite there yet and we are still working at full speed on our mission - namely to establish 5G in industry across the board and thus take Industry 4.0 to the next level.

What challenges are you currently facing? Where are the stumbling blocks?

As already mentioned, a lot is currently revolving around the development of a sustainable ecosystem and the successful transition from theory to practice. Among other things, we are currently planning to establish so-called '5G-ACIA Ambassadors' in various regions around the world in order to engage even more closely with local users and generally bring the topic of 5G and the associated opportunities closer to users in a compact and target group-oriented manner. To support this, we are also currently working internally on a methodology to determine the business value of Industrial 5G in practice. From a technical perspective, we are currently working on topics such as "NR RedCap", the so-called "reduced capability" mode of 5G, which is of particular interest for industrial sensors and actuators, for example, the use of 5G for machine vision applications and the integration of 5G with DetNet. DetNet stands for "Deterministic Networking" and is to a certain extent comparable to TSN, but is located on layer 3 and not layer 2 of the protocol stack.

What concrete results can be expected in the next 12 months?

In addition to further interesting and informative white papers on various topics, we want to increasingly analyze the market development and the constantly growing ecosystem and provide corresponding insights into it. As mentioned, we are also planning to strengthen our global presence, e.g. major events are planned in Taipei, Austin, Beijing and Frankfurt. The most important thing, however, is certainly to support and accompany the successful market launch of Industrial 5G across the board, so that everyone from large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises can benefit from the advantages of Industrial 5G, and the 5G-ACIA will clearly remain the most important address for first-hand information.

5G-ACIA at the SPS 2023: Hall 3, Stand 331