Demonstrating the Impact of LTE Communication Latency for Industrial Applications

This paper assesses the performance of a private LTE wireless network in an industrial automation setup. Our goal is to study the impact of communication latency in a robot arm position control application when the position feedback signal is transmitted via a commercial LTE wireless link. An Ethernet link scenario is considered as our benchmark. We show that even under very specific conditions (no network load, high signal power), the wireless link cannot achieve a satisfactory performance. The proposed demonstration provides a simple visualization of how LTE network latency disturbs the robot behavior, leading to undesired overshoots, oscillations and even stopping its movements. These results demonstrate that even a private LTE network is still incapable of providing the low latency required by industry automation applications, which shall be incorporated in the upcoming 5G wireless systems.