The work on "5G4Industry" has set a promising milestone in 5G research. A consortium of companies and research institutions from NRW has created a solution that can be used to allocate 5G resources to specific applications and plan investments for the long term. The results are available as an open source solution and a demonstrator can be experienced in the SmartFactory OWL.
Efficient 5G use with targeted resource management
In some circles, the benefits of 5G are being praised as a panacea - although many companies, especially smaller ones, do not yet see any need for this enormous network capacity. The fact is, however, that more and more machines are being networked, more and more sensors are being developed and installed, and more and more process data is being recorded, processed, stored and retrieved. New business cases based on this data are being developed almost daily. Production processes are optimized, packaging material is saved, personnel are relieved and much more. In short: it's worth it. And it will be so worthwhile that the benefits of 5G campus networks will soon be needed in many areas to connect the masses of sensors.
The "5G4Industry" project is moving towards this near and realistic future. If radio resources are limited, but demand is high and, above all, fluctuating, a solution is needed to manage and allocate resources appropriately. It is not economical to keep an excess of radio resources available at all times. The project consortium felt it made more sense to assign specific properties to each application, which would allow the applications to be prioritized. This involved answering questions such as: Can the application be executed in a more resource-efficient manner? Can the application run more slowly or be interrupted abruptly or not at all? What does a restriction of resources or failure of an application mean financially for the company?
As a result, a management tool was created on the basis of real data that monitors network utilization and can automatically issue instructions to interrupt or switch off applications at short notice.
Making the right investment decision through long-term planning
In addition to the management tool, a planning tool was developed to enable a company that is constantly evolving to decide in good time whether and how many additional wireless resources should be purchased. It collects data from the management tool and also contains information about the company's future plans. This enables it to make a recommendation on the basis of real live costs as to whether to rent short-term radio and infrastructure resources or purchase additional long-term resources of its own.
27 months of project work
With generous funding from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, "5G4Industry: 5G networks for industrial use - from core to access" was launched on January 1, 2020. Until March 31, 2023, the project partners (InnoZent OWL e.V., SI-Lab at Paderborn University, inIT at Ostwestfahlen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences, BENTELER Business Services GmbH, MECSware GmbH, Nuromedia GmbH and Weidmüller Interface GmbH & Co. KG) joined forces to achieve the project goal. SI-Lab had a particular focus on the development of the planning tool, while inIT focused on the development of the management tool. BENTELER and Weidmüller (associated partner) developed and provided real application scenarios and real data, which were refined by InnoZent OWL with a focus on the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises. MECSware was able to contribute a wide range of expertise relating to 5G campus networks, their installation, integration and operation. Nuromedia was able to contribute expertise in the field of AR applications. The entire consortium is extremely satisfied with the collaboration and the results and is looking forward to further projects with each other and with new partners.
