System-Level Performance Evaluation of 5G Use Cases for Industrial Scenarios

The Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile radio technologies represents a change of paradigm in mobile communications by serving not only users but also verticals. Given the increasing number of use cases identified for industrial scenarios, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) defined a set of relevant use cases for Indoor Factory (InF) scenarios with their associated requirements and channel models to theoretically study signal propagation in these environments. In this context, this work first studies these InF scenarios by means of System-level Simulations (SLSs). By selecting the most demanding sub-scenario, we then carry out a performance evaluation of the specific 5G industrial use cases with the most stringent requirements, following 3GPP assumptions. Three use cases from the thirteen defined by the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA) have been carefully selected: massive wireless sensor networks, autonomous mobile robots, and augmented reality. The results demonstrate the fulfillment of the performance requirements in each use case, validating 5G as an enabler technology for future industry verticals.