Performance of Private LTE on the Factory Floor

With the rising desire for flexibility on the factory floor as well as the interest in wireless technologies in factory automation increasing special focus falls on private cellular networks. To this end, this paper examines the performance of a fully private LTE network installation in an automotive factory while production is ongoing. The used devices are industry grade and are mobile during the measurements. We assess the statistical significance of these measurements and are able to show their high statistical significance. In addition, future challenges for the evaluation of wireless and cellular networks in such settings are pointed out. A comparison of the requirements from possible future factory use cases with the performance of the examined network illustrates that many use cases originally proposed for 5G are already feasible with a private LTE network.