Cross-Layer Design and Performance Analysis for Ultra-Reliable Factory of the Future Based on 5G Mobile Networks

Abstract

To provide a new level of reliability, latency, and support a massive number of users and smart objects, a new 5G multi-services air interface needs to be addressed for the factory of the future (FoF). However, there are limitations in providing connectivity to a dynamic machine in a factory due to several strict industrial automation requirements. In particular, the strict wireless communication latency and reliability requirements are the major challenges to enable the Industry 4.0 vision. In this paper, a PHY-MAC layer cross-layer model that combines a semi-persistent scheduling at the medium access control layer and NOMA at the physical layer has been proposed to address the limitations. The work extensively investigates the performance of the factory of the future with various considerations of 5G spectrums (in this case 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz), speeds and frequency diversity. In addition, the packet error rate (PER), outage probability and throughput in MAC are evaluated in terms of network density deployment (sparse, moderate, dense), different kinds of speed; 0 km/h, 3 km/h, 7 km/h and 10 km/h, under two 5G frequency spectrums. Through extensive simulations, the considered 5G system parameters produced better results in terms of reliability, where the results showed that the frequency diversity outperformed non-diversity by 2 dB. In a sparse network, the PER results showed better results compared to the dense network density by 2 dB (MMSE), 8 dB (LS-Linear) and 2 dB (LS-Spline). Besides that, robotics in sparse network density and stationary exhibited the best PER results, which is as low as 10 ^-7 . Moreover, the performance of mid-band frequency outperformed the high-band frequency by 1.8dB (MMSE) in dense condition and 1.5 dB (MMSE) in sparse deployment at PER = 10 ^-6 . Hence, this study could be a useful insight for the factory of the future services that are utilizing a 5G mid-band spectrum as well as a high-band spectrum.