Commercial 5G NPN and PN Deployment Options for Industrial Manufacturing: An Empirical Study of Performance and Complexity Tradeoffs

As the manufacturing sector adopts Industry 4.0, the need arises for flexible and highly reliable wireless communication networks. 5G has been designed to support these industrial needs, but choosing the right deployment option is nontrivial. In this paper we empirically measure KPIs of three different commercially available 5G deployment options in the Aalborg University 5G Smart Production Lab and compare them in terms of the KPIs and deployment complexity. Option 1 being fully Non-Public Networks (NPN), option 2 using a private RAN connected to a public EPC through a WAN connection, and option 3 using private RAN and public EPC through IPsec. We find that NPN and PN 5G can deliver comparable performance in terms of latency, throughput and packet loss. As such PN 5G are found to be very competitive with NPN solutions, especially when considering upfront costs and complexity of maintenance. NPN is found to deliver best in class latency while having the advantage of total privacy.