Wireless Industrial Networks for Real-Time Applications

One of the biggest challenges currently facing the industry is to make systems more flexible. Technological advances are enabling new application scenarios such as safe and efficient human-robot collaboration, which is based on the real-time availability of required data at the location where it is needed at that point in time. The crucial building block for this modernization of factories is the communication network between the automation components as it is the one enabler for constant and reliable exchange of information. In the future, an essential and ever increasing part of such a communication network will be wireless communication. It plays a major role in expanding the mobility and agility of sensors and actuators and in the retrofitting of rigid legacy structures. For smart production in particular, wireless technologies that are reliable and support deterministic cycle times in the range of less than 1 ms are required, which is barely addressed by current wireless developments based on IEEE 802.11 and 5G URLLC. This paper presents a novel real-time radio technology – Ultra Reliable Wireless Industrial Network (UWIN), developed by Fraunhofer IIS, which is currently in a preliminary pre-product development stage. In addition to explaining the UWIN concept, this paper provides a short overview on state-of-the-art real-time radio technologies.