Empowering Smart Factories With Open RAN

It is envisioned that 6G mobile networks will enhance and majorly empower the Industry 4.0 paradigm, evolving towards smart factories with optimized and customized services. Especially the smart factory scenario with real-time and high-capacity data communication presents us with new challenges, both in communications (mmW/sub-THz) and networking. This article discusses these new challenges and proposes extensions to the current Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) standards for 6G networks to enable further evolution of Industry 4.0 and beyond. We motivate the need for real-time functionalities in Open RAN and an extended interface to the user equipment (UE) to allow for its fine-grained control.