Private 5G Networks for Connected Industries
5G CONNI is a joint EU-Taiwan project within the European Union Horizon 2020 program that brings together major players in ICT and Industry 4.0 from Europe and Taiwan with the joint vision of paving the way for industrial 5G applications and accelerating deployments. It aims at providing an integrated end-to-end 5G test and demonstration network in selected real-world application environments, building on current results from standardization and related research projects. With the first commercial 5G products starting to reach general market availability in 2019, the project will provide an important contribution in verifying these technologies for new usage scenarios and business models while identifying and developing key enabling technologies for successful end-to-end integration and operation in relevant applications.
The project will follow an application centric approach for building an international multi-site 5G Smart Factory demonstrator that incorporates one manufacturing facility of Bosch in Germany and the Intelligent Machine Tools Center (IMTC) of ITRI in Taiwan. With this application target, 5G CONNI will address use cases in the area between the ITU-defined edge cases enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC).
A core aspect of 5G CONNI is the newly emerging notion of private 5G networks. While 5G technologies such as network slicing may accommodate industrial applications in public networks, the generational leap from 4G to 5G offers the opportunity to not only re-architect the network, but also the operator and deployment models. Private 5G networks, operating locally and highly optimized towards specific applications, are envisioned by the 5G CONNI partners to be an important component in helping both 5G and Industry 4.0 deliver on their promises.
