5G and the Industrial Internet （1）
Simply put, 5G is the fifth generation of mobile communications designed to support higher broadband throughput, ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, and massive IoT communications. It's worth noting that while 5G networks are 100 times faster than 4G connections, 5G is far from just an upgrade from 4G. There is no doubt that the emergence of 5G will completely change the industrial Internet.
So, what is the Industrial Internet? General Electric Company once put forward the following concept: "The Industrial Internet is to connect people, data, and machines", that is to say, the three elements of the Industrial Internet are people, data, and machines. Here we try to extend this concept a little bit: the essence of the Industrial Internet is to closely connect equipment, production lines, employees, factories, warehouses, suppliers, products, and customers through an open and global communication network platform, sharing various elements and resources of the whole process of industrial production to make it digital, networked, automated and intelligent, so as to achieve efficiency improvement and cost reduction.
When 5G meets the Industrial Internet, a magical chemical reaction happens. High connection rate, ultra-low network latency, massive terminal access, and high reliability, these advantages of 5G are very conducive to 5G replacing existing communication technologies in industrial plants and urban infrastructure, including short-range communication technology such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. Some industrialization and informatization scenarios that were previously limited by network access have become feasible with the blessing of 5G.
5G applications:
1) 5G helps industrial automation
The core of industrial automation is the closed-loop control system, and the key point of the closed-loop control system is to transmit the data collected by the sensor to the controller and actuator in time within a control cycle. The requirements of the closed-loop control system for this kind of communication experiment are on the order of milliseconds or less. Once the delay of information transmission exceeds a certain value, or a transmission error occurs, it will bring great economic losses and even casualties. 5G can provide extremely low latency and high reliability, making it possible for closed-loop control applications to be connected via wireless networks. 4G is far from being able to do this.
2) 5G helps intelligent manufacturing
5G technology will also play an important role in future smart production. 5G can provide platform-level cloud technology support for logistics, material loading, warehousing, and transportation plan decision-making in production. The collection and processing of a large amount of data in a very short period of time, the centralized and unified management of precision sensor data, the perfect combination of cloud computing, distributed databases and industrial robots, and autonomous learning and accurate judgment formed by a large number of networked hosts. These are all industrial Internet platform capabilities built on 5G. These capabilities will provide excellent solutions for smart factory manufacturing. With the help of D2D (Device-to-Device) technology under 5G, direct communication between things and things can be realized, which reduces the end-to-end delay of services. As a result, the time of each link of manufacturing is shorter, and the solution is faster and better, thereby improving the efficiency of manufacturing.
