Will 5G become yet another wireless technology for industrial automation?

With the growing interest in adoption of wireless technologies in industrial automation and the continuous search for new revenue streams new players are entering the arena in order to make their business grow further. One of the emerging wireless technologies aiming to support industrial automation applications is 5G, targeting anything from extreme throughput (> 10 Gbit/s) to extreme low latency (≤ 1 ms) to ultra high reliability (≥ 99.999%). In this article we intend to discuss the potential and challenges of adopting 5G in real industrial environments and give a more balanced picture compared to previous articles mainly written by telecom researchers and vendors as a way to promote their technology. Specifically, this article will discuss and provide some real industrial requirements, describe the main technical features of 5G and try to assess what applications it will support that are not by already supported by existing technologies. In the end, the success of 5G will depend on appealing business models and scalability, i.e., whether or not the same equipment can be deployed worldwide without any changes and spectrum rules, and the migration paths beyond 5G for reasonable business risks.

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