Industrial wireless communications over the millimeter wave spectrum: opportunities and challenges

The large bandwidth available at the mmWave spectrum can open the way for a wide variety of new industrial automation capabilities. With the use of wireless smart cameras and vision technologies, applications such as remote visual monitoring and surveillance, intelligent logistics product tracking, image guided automated assembly, and fault detection can be realized. Vision capabilities can enable robots, machines, and other industrial automation systems to meaningfully interact with objects and safely navigate through their surroundings. Allowing them to adapt to changing manufacturing-line conditions opens a wide range of new industrial automation applications. In this article, we discuss the opportunities, challenges, and design principles of industrial wireless communication over the mmWave spectrum. Open research issues are identified and discussed. In addition, performance analysis of mmWave industrial systems with respect to channel capacity is conducted using a realistic physical-statistical-based channel model.