Performance Evaluation of 5G Use Cases for Smart Factory

The fifth generation (5G) has been deployed within the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) applications thanks to the various benefits in terms of latency, scalability, energy savings and so on. In order to address the deployment of 5G within IIoT, several research works have been proposed in the literature to optimize the performance of the diverse services of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). Most of these research works have been proposed at the radio and network levels to maximize the data rate considering ultra-low latency communication. Unlike these research works, this paper aims to develop three use cases (UCs) for smart factory and propose a joint framework for processing at the factory floor processing level. The developed UCs consider an application of immersive operator (IO) inside a factory that is connected remotely with an ergonomist via 5G or long-term evolution (LTE). Furthermore, the proposed framework is analyzed on a network simulator in order to compare the performance of 5G and LTE technologies in terms of energy consumption, throughput and end-to-end (E2E) delay. Based on the simulation results, throughput and delay in case of 5G are found to outperform LTE technology by more than 90% and 40%, respectively.