Distributed Management of Dynamic Reliability in Beyond 5G Industrial Environments for Extreme Low Latency Communication

One of the most relevant innovations brought by 5G technology within industrial environments is the possibility to deploy ultra-reliable low latency communication services enabling dynamic handling of critical situations, such as those involving fast control loops. However, the reliability levels offered by current 5G communication standards are limited to static configurations of up to two redundant channels. This design choice might be insufficient for use cases where extreme reliability and low latency levels are needed for relatively short time periods, as in the case of collaborative robot-human scenarios. In this paper, we explore the possibility of applying dynamic reliability in beyond 5G industrial environments by adaptive provisioning of multiple redundant communication channels, depending on the specific requirements of the involved applications. We refer to a hierarchical control framework consisting of a centralized element which coordinates multiple distributed ones that are designed to perform fast control operations and guarantee extreme low latency. In this framework, we propose to divide the industrial plant into multiple sub-areas each controlled by the distributed elements with the main target of reducing the computation times in determining the optimal communication channels to ensure reliability. An algorithm is proposed to solve this task and is evaluated in terms of its execution time as a function of the environment parameters by simulation. Main results provide quantitative insights on how to properly design the proposed distributed network framework by exploiting the new degree of freedom represented by the number of sub-areas and related distributed control elements.