How to cite:Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

How to cite:Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

The idea of a network traffic oscillator (NTO) is presented for dynamically adjusting to network conditions so as to ensure the best response time for all safety critical application payloads in a network. The context of the work is airport networking where the desire for greater interconnectivity coupled with Ethernet adoption makes the delivery of real-time deterministic service extremely challenging. The prevailing approach via the Enhanced Interior Gate Routing Protocol (EIGRP) is presented since it finds widespread commercial application for reliable data exchange. However, it still produces great variation in packet delivery times as a result of varying congestion and buffer delays. The NTO matches the transmission rates to the links in the network by its resonant nature an using as routing vector metric. Simulations of a typical airfield network show that the NTO delivers a reduction of over 25% in network response time for radar data transmissions with minimal response time variance. Moreover, only 1% of packets experience problematic transmission delays compared to 10% using EIGRP. The NTO thus offers real-time deterministic Ethernet performance for safety critical applications.

This paper presents sub-6 GHz channel measurements using a directional antenna at the transmitter and a directional or omnidirectional antenna at the receiver at 4.145 GHz in sparse and dense industrial environments for a line-of-sight scenario. Furthermore, the first measured over-the-air error vector magnitude (EVM) results depending on different 5G new radio modulation and coding schemes (MCSs of16 QAM, 64 QAM and 256 QAM) are provided. From the measurement campaigns, the path loss exponents (PLE) using a directional and an omnidirectional antenna at the receiver in the sparse and the dense environment are 1.24/1.39 and 1.35/1.5, respectively. PLE results are lower than the theoretical free space PLE of 2, indicating that indoor industrial environments have rich multipaths. The measured power delay profiles show the maximum root mean square (RMS) delay spreads of 11 ns with a directional antenna and 34 ns with an omnidirectional antenna at the receiver in a sparse industrial environment. However, in a dense industrial environment the maximum RMS delay spreads are significantly increased: maximum RMS delay spreads range from 226 to 282 ns for the omnidirectional and the directional antenna configuration. EVM measurements show that to increase coverage and enable higher MCS modes to be used for reliable data transmission, in both industrial environments using a directional antenna at the transmitter and the receiver is required. The large-scale path loss models, multipath time dispersion characteristics and EVM results provide insight into the deployments of 5G networks operating at sub-6 GHz frequency bands in different industrial environments.