Reliable and Deterministic Mobile Communications for Industry 4.0: Key Challenges and Solutions for the Integration of the 3GPP 5G System with IEEE

The digitization of industrial automation processes calls for flexible, adaptable, and scalable communication solutions in order to enable the vision of a truly "cyber-physical system". In this context, IEEE Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), developed by the TSN task group of the IEEE 802.1 working group, receives particular interest as it defines mechanisms for the time-sensitive (i.e., deterministic) transmission of data over Ethernet networks. In order to enable novel use cases and further improve the efficiency of industrial automation, mobile communication solutions are needed. Here, the time-sensitive communications (TSC) service in 3GPP Release 16 aims to support applications requiring deterministic or isochronous communication with high reliability and availability, such as IEEE TSN and IETF DetNet, over 5G mobile networks. This paper briefly depicts the favorable deployment scenarios for an integrated 5G/TSN system in Industry 4.0 environments. It further describes the requirements in integrating a 5G system (5GS) with an IEEE TSN system and depicts the 3GPP integrated system architecture, which foresees to present the 5GS to the TSN system like any other TSN-aware bridge. Subsequently, the focus of this paper lies on presenting remaining challenges as well as solutions to a subset of these challenges, particularly focusing on radio access, core, and network management aspects as well as QoS mapping framework.