5G and Beyond Technologies in Smart Manufacturing, 2nd Edition

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Industrial Electronics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 1716

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL), RWTH Aachen University, 52074 Aachen, Germany
Interests: production metrology; networked, adaptive production; 5G applications in manufacturing; metrology-assisted robotics; assembly; production intelligence; quality management
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Guest Editor
Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden
Interests: mobile networks; cellular IoT; 5G for manufacturing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Communication systems are the backbone of future factories. In this context, digitization and networking are taking on an increasingly important role for manufacturing companies to make their production processes more flexible and, at the same time, more robust, ultimately with the vision of resilient factories.

Cellular technology has a high potential to become an important factor in future manufacturing because of the ability to wirelessly connect multiple assets in factories and simultaneously guarantee them a determined quality of service (QoS). Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) is of particular importance in this context.

To further develop the 5G ecosystem, additional R&D efforts are required to make industrial 5G devices marketable and validate their performance in the corresponding use cases. Furthermore, the integration of 5G networks into an industrial LAN and interaction with edge–cloud systems is of high importance. The coexistence of public and non-public cellular networks also needs to be investigated, as well as different 5G services, e.g., positioning, time synchronization and network exposure interface.

Moreover, beyond 5G and 6G system concepts need to be analyzed for manufacturing applications. Human-inclusive production, sustainability aspects, energy-efficient designs, AI/ML-native cellular architectures, dependable communication and network digital twins are some of the topics seen relevant for enabling smart manufacturing.  

Therefore, this Special Issue covers essential aspects of current research topics on the use of 5G in production, while also addressing potential features beyond 5G and their relevance for manufacturing

Prof. Dr. Robert Schmitt
Dr. Joachim Sachs
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • 5G use cases for smart production
  • industrial 5G devices
  • performance analysis
  • network coexistence analysis
  • 5G industrial LAN and edge–cloud integration
  • beyond 5G proof-of-concept prototypes for smart production
  • deterministic communication
  • early 6G prototype systems

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 5059 KiB  
Article
5G-TSN Integrated Prototype for Reliable Industrial Communication Using Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability
by Pierre E. Kehl, Junaid Ansari, Mikael Lovrin, Praveen Mohanram, Chi-Chuan (Eric) Liu, Jun-Lin (Larry) Yeh and Robert H. Schmitt
Electronics 2025, 14(4), 758; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14040758 - 15 Feb 2025
Viewed by 914
Abstract
The stringent requirements of industrial communication, especially high reliability and real-time response, are regarded as the main bottlenecks for the widespread adoption of wireless technologies in industrial applications. The integration of 5G and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) protocols offers convergence of both wireless and [...] Read more.
The stringent requirements of industrial communication, especially high reliability and real-time response, are regarded as the main bottlenecks for the widespread adoption of wireless technologies in industrial applications. The integration of 5G and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) protocols offers convergence of both wireless and various wired communication technologies for industrial applications. In this article, we describe our 5G and TSN integrated prototype, which achieves high reliability based on the IEEE 802.1CB Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability (FRER) scheme. Different 5G systems have been used in various combinations to empirically study the benefits of FRER for 5G communication in real industrial environments. We evaluate the performance of our prototype and validate it for an industrial use case on Smart Sensors for Milling Processes, requiring a latency below 10 ms for 99.99% of the packets sent, which has been achieved in the measurements using FRER. This use case and the high requirements towards latency and reliability demonstrate the benefits of 5G integration with FRER for industrial production. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue 5G and Beyond Technologies in Smart Manufacturing, 2nd Edition)
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