Communication-Control Co-design for Robotic Manipulation in 5G Industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use cases have stringent reliability and latency requirements to enable real-time wireless control systems, which are supported by the 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). However, extremely high quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in 5G URLLC causes huge radio resource consumption and low spectral efficiency, thus limiting network capacity in terms of the number of supported devices. Industrial control applications typically incorporate redundancy in their design and may not always require extreme QoS to achieve the expected control performance. Therefore, we propose both communication-control co-design and dynamic QoS to address the capacity issue for robotic manipulation use cases in 5G-based IIoT. We have developed an advanced co-simulation framework that includes a network simulator, physics simulator, and compute emulator, for realistic performance evaluation of the proposed methods. Through simulations, we show significant improvements in network capacity (i.e., the number of supported URLLC devices), and about 2x gain for the robotic manipulation use case.