Managing 5G Non-Public Networks from Industrial Automation Systems

By expanding beyond broadband capabilities of commercial mobile networks and providing novel connectivity features for a wide variety of industry verticals, 5G is becoming a key enabler for the digitalization of industry. However, unlike consumer market where users have very similar communication needs, industrial environments require direct control of security and performance aspects of an underlying networking infrastructure to achieve high communication availability and determinism for a broad range of applications and services. Similarly, it is vital to continuously monitor and verify the connectivity status and performance of devices, especially for mission-critical industrial systems. This paper investigates how to achieve fundamental management capabilities for 5G networks from industrial automation systems, which we refer to as “5G Managed from Industrial Automation”, while hiding “low-level” complexities of the technology. It presents a simplified 5G network management and monitoring solution, designed according to the functional requirements of a process control system, and based on a prototype of 5G system exposure capabilities. In addition, the paper presents details about the design and implementation of the 5G management solution in an ABB industrial automation system and its verification on a private 5G network offered by Ericsson.