5G as Key Technology for Networked Factories: Application of Vertical-specific Network Services for Enabling Flexible Smart Manufacturing

Abstract

In recent years, the interest in interconnecting production machines has grown and new technologies such as augmented reality enter the shop floor. This evolution is driven by hyped topics such as Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things. These topics promise benefits through increasing transparency in factories, such as improvement in efficiency and reduced costs, e.g., due to data analysis. As a result, the demand on new concepts and technologies for factory networks is rising to fulfill the upcoming new requirements. Therefore, the development of 5G comes just in time. This paper is focused on one of the 5G core technologies network function virtualization (NFV). We propose two use cases that demonstrate how NFV enables flexible smart manufacturing. In NFV technology, virtual network functions (VNF) are composed to network services. We introduce the application of our vertical-specific network services that enable augmented reality on-demand and the flexible interconnection of production machines with services in company's cloud backend.

Putting NFV into Reality: Physical Smart Manufacturing Testbed

“…Schneider et al [15] and Müller et al [16] built on this concept and enriched the machine connecting use case with more details. They designed manufacturing-specific VNFs that are necessary to realize the use case and composed them into two network services.…”

“…In addition to both network services, a third network service was proposed in [13] and [16] for enabling augmented reality (AR) applications on-demand; e.g., for remote maintenance of an injection molding machine using Microsoft HoloLens 2 (Figure 1) or a maintenance assistance system.…”

“…In Fig. 2: Demonstration of using Microsoft Power BI for data visualization on Microsoft HoloLens P r e -p r i n t [13], [16] augmented reality on-demand was proposed. In the scenario addressed in both papers, the Microsoft HoloLens is used by a technical staff to visualize machine data.…”

“…Müller et al propose in [16] a third network service (NS3) that contains a router which interconnects the local AP with the Internet and enables the Internet connection of the Microsoft HoloLens on-demand. This concept can be used to reduce interferences due to competing WiFi devices (APs) by power off APs that are not needed.…”

“…As proposed in [16], we planed to migrate the deployment from NFV-enabled emulator to an NFV infrastructure using Kubernetes. Traditionally, virtual machines (VMs) are used with guest operating systems that run on top of a hypervisor, such as OpenStack, but we use Kubernetes for deployment of container based network services.…”