Data Shower in Electronics Manufacturing: Measuring Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 6, and 5G SA behavior in production assembly lines

Reliable, low-latency and high-performance 5G access is one of the key pillars sustaining the vision of industry 4.0 and of the reconfigurable factory of the future. This work contributes to the body of empirical knowledge on how a live 5G networks perform in a production factory environment. The analysis focuses on implementing a ”data shower” use case in a production Electronics assembly line which consists of in Over The Air (OTA) download of the firmware for the boards being assembled in the assembly line. Results include a comparison between Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G SA in terms of capability of the network to serve concurrent OTA firmware connections, as well as in terms network resiliency expressed as the probability of complying with the latency requirements of the implemented use case while serving a variable number of OTA firmware download processes.