LTE evolution — Latency reduction and reliability enhancements for wireless industrial automation

Industrial automation applications generally have stringent communication requirements in terms of low latency and high reliability. Existing wireless technologies operating in the unlicensed spectrum are unable to fulfill these requirements owing to the regulatory constraints for coexistence and spectrum sharing. In this paper, we (i) comprehensively analyze and classify the typical industrial automation applications based on their latency and reliability requirements, (ii) investigate the performance of LTE and its latency reduction and reliability enhancements, and (iii) identify which classes of industrial automation applications can be satisfied by using LTE and its enhancements. Our detailed system level simulation results indicate that LTE (release 14 and beyond) is able to satisfy the requirements for some of the identified industrial automation use-cases such as machine tools, production lines, and logistics.