Factory Radio Design of a 5G Network in Offline Mode

The manufacturing industry is connecting people and equipment with new digital technologies, enabling a more continuous stream of data to represent processes. With more things connected, the interest in a connectivity solution that can support communication with high reliability and availability will increase. The fifth generation of telecommunication, i.e., 5G has promising features to deliver this, but the factory environment introduces new challenges to ensure reliable radio coverage. This will require efficient ways to plan the Factory Radio Design prior to installation. 3D laser scanning is used at an ever-increasing rate for capturing the spatial geometry in a virtual representation to perform layout planning of factories. This paper presents how to combine 3D laser scanning and physical optics (PO) for planning the Factory Radio Design of a cellular Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network (5G) in a virtual environment. 3D laser scanning is applied to obtain the spatial data of the factory and the virtual representation serves as the environment where PO computation techniques can be performed. The simulation result is validated in this paper by comparison to measurements of the installed network and empirical propagation models. The results of the study show promising opportunities to simulate the radio coverage in a virtual representation of a factory environment.