Evaluation of Communication Technologies for Distributed Industrial Control Systems: Concept and Evaluation of 5G and WiFi 6

Industrial automation requires communication with low latencies and high reliability between controllers, sensors and actuators. State of the art is usually a wired connection via Ethernet in combination with specialized industrial protocols. Wired connections are difficult to realize in certain applications. New wireless technologies such as WiFi 6 and 5G promise to achieve reliability and low latencies as currently only possible via wired connections. It is necessary to consider during the engineering phase whether the requirements of an industrial application are met by a selected communication technology. This paper presents an approach to evaluate communication technologies for industrial control systems during the system engineering phase, considering future application conditions. The focus of the approach is on the evaluation of communication latency. It is necessary to examine different technological variants or parameters in order to determine their respective influence on communication and the overall system. The approach makes it possible to identify relevant parameters affecting performance of the communication. Thus, predictions about the expected performance of the application with regard to communication can be made during engineering. The approach was implemented and tested with a private 5G standalone network and a WiFi 6 network, using Ethernet as reference.