Next-generation Wireless Solutions for the Smart Factory, Smart Vehicles, the Smart Grid and Smart Cities

TL;DR

This survey explores 5G's role in enabling automation across smart factories, vehicles, grids, and cities, emphasizing key requirements, challenges, and future 6G visions for vertical domain support.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of 5G technologies, challenges, and research dedicated to supporting automation in various smart vertical domains, and discusses future 6G prospects.

Findings

Identifies key performance requirements for 5G in vertical domains.

Highlights enabling 5G technologies for automation.

Discusses challenges faced by industry and academia.

Abstract

5G wireless systems will extend mobile communication services beyond mobile telephony, mobile broadband, and massive machine-type communication into new application domains, namely the so-called vertical domains including the smart factory, smart vehicles, smart grid, smart city, etc. Supporting these vertical domains comes with demanding requirements: high-availability, high-reliability, low-latency, and in some cases, high-accuracy positioning. In this survey, we first identify the potential key performance requirements of 5G communication in support of automation in the vertical domains and highlight the 5G enabling technologies conceived for meeting these requirements. We then discuss the key challenges faced both by industry and academia which have to be addressed in order to support automation in the vertical domains. We also provide a survey of the related research dedicated to automation in the vertical domains. Finally, our vision of 6G wireless systems is discussed briefly.