IOT,5G and Manufacturing(for tyros).
I remember the using Nokia phone for first time. At the start two people shake their hands and then with Nokia tone a message was displayed "Connecting people." and indeed the telecom industry has brought people and other things together.
What is 5G: in layman's terms 5G is new form revolution in the digital cellular network, and it works individual antennas which are called cells which send focused radio waves like a flash light instead of previous technologies like bulb which sends signals in every directions.Also other technologies like MIMO , beam-forming and full duplex also plays a crucial role in 5G technology.
The in G stands for generation. the first G or 1G gave us the first mobile phone. 2G gave us text messages, while 3G became a disruptive technology and gave us the internet. Addition to this 4G empowered us with high speed which we use to play cats videos at phenomenally fast rate. 5G is the next generation telecon breakthrough which will help us deliver massive IOT ecosystem. It will provide us with the speed up-to 10Gbps.
5G is best for IIOT applications because of its low latency. A latency is defined as time taken for devices to respond to each other over the wireless network. Or time taken to relieve packet of data between two points. Factors which are affects the latency are speed, availability of bandwidth and size of the data that needs to be transmitted. 3G networks had a typical response time of 100 milliseconds, 4G is around 30 milliseconds and 5G will be as low as. 1 millisecond. This is virtually instantaneous opening up a new world of connected applications.
Coming to IIOT part of systems, One question that needs to be answered is "do we really have to connect all machine to cloud and gather data in order to process it?". For small factories and workshops the answer is NO. Humans can make observations and then come up with system as a feedback option. For medium and big factories it is really necessary to implement IIOT, YES, even though it is considered as an accessory rather than a crucial part of manufacturing. Some companies use to optimize the process it self with vast amount of data which can be collected through affordable sensors. Also it can be used for predicting when the machine might required maintenance. Let's take an example. Suppose in shipping section there is robotic arms which helps to transfer all the goods coming from the assembly to boxes. The weight of the product may vary as manufacturing is done in batches. With this information the we predict when the bearing of the arm might fail with consideration of other parameters. So to do so we can deploy sensors at pick up lines to measure the weight of the product and number of products it handles, also we can add torque measurement devices on the arm. These information is send to cloud where analyst can analyse this information and notify someone on the floor so that they are ready when the breakdown occurs.To take this even further the cloud could entirely remove the human/analyst part from this equation and place the order of the spare parts itself rather than consulting a human. Although this might seems easy and redundant , in actual working environment there are more than 100 parameters needs to be taken into consideration and that is why we need better connectivity and high speed connection which 5G provides.
Some of the challenges that one might face would be cost of implementation and data security. Also someone might deploy systems just for the sake of it. But eventually everything will be connected and then we can start seeing the true of internet of things.