5G Network Programmability Enabling Industry 4.0 Transformation

Introduction

We’re at the dawn of the next industrial revolution, commonly known as Industry 4.0, which will deliver greater operational efficiencies and flexibility at lower costs. The transition towards Industry 4.0 will offer advances in every aspect, from remote monitoring to advanced analytics and maintenance. However, the key factor for Industry 4.0 is connectivity, so manufacturers are able to use data to gain insight about their assets, be informed and make decisions on how to optimise their processes.

The intense research work on 5G experimentation globally (Díaz-Zayas et al., 2020), has reached the point where the 5G capabilities and evolvements, are appealing to be the ideal enablers aiming to shape a new and dynamic ecosystem in mobile networks from both the technology and marketing perspectives (Kostakis et al., 2021). 5G networks are envisioned to achieve a wider variety of objectives in terms of higher multi Gbps data speeds, ultra-low latency, advanced reliability, increased network capacity and availability, as well as greater bandwidth and throughput (Koumaras et al., 2021). These characteristics are essential for effectively leveraging the various services that are taking place across the entire lifecycle of the operations and processes within the verticals related to Industry 4.0. Among these unique characteristics another crucial functionality that 5G networks provide and offers high business potential, is the network exposure, which can in turn enable new levels of programmability within core networks. The programmability provided by 5G networks will unveil a wide list of network capabilities and services to third-party developers allowing them to enhance existing use cases or even create new ones.

In the light of the above, the goal of this chapter is to advocate the optimal exploitation of the 5G technology towards the enhancement of the Industry 4.0 applications, and to present the new network architecture including the “open” core capabilities, as the new frontier for business innovation in industrial applications. Towards this direction, the first three sections of the chapter describe the capabilities that the 5G system will provide to the verticals along with the key concepts and services that are related to the 5G openness, whereas Section 4 introduces the Vertical Application Enabler concept related to the deployment of vertical applications. Section 5 introduces the realisation of the Non-Public Network (NPN) Infrastructure in the Industry 4.0, and Section 6 presents a Factory of the Future (FoF) use case in order to showcase the utilisation of 5G programmability and network exposure.