When a network fails in any business it can cause problems. However, when it fails in new, emerging time-sensitive industrial operations – with exponentially more connections – the impact can very quickly become business critical. Below, we explore the enhanced role of network redundancy in today’s manufacturing and explain how you can design an optimal solution to keep your operations running in an era of massive transformation.

Manufacturing Business Development Director, Ericsson North America

Manufacturing Business Development Director, Ericsson North America

Manufacturing Business Development Director, Ericsson North America

In the late 1960s, the breakthrough of modern computing – embodied by the programmable logic controller (PLC) – changed the face of American society by bringing new levels of automation to everything from home appliances to traffic systems. It also sparked an inflection point in the golden era of manufacturing, producing new reprogrammable ways of working and scaling production across major manufacturing sectors.

Today, manufacturing is experiencing another inflection point. This time, the technology that’s changing everything is high-performance 5G systems which itself can enable a powerful interplay of disruptive, enabling technologies such as distributed cloud and edge computing, massive IoT, AI and automation, among others.

Based on 3GPP standards, 5G is built to a much higher standard than any other connectivity model deployed within the manufacturing value chain. As you read this, manufacturing blueprints are already being overhauled and re-engineered based on a powerful foundation of in-built five-nines security, latency as low as one millisecond, unmatched positioning technologies and significantly higher throughput capable of supporting ever-demanding manufacturing applications such as collaborative robots, digital twins, and even holographic remote interaction. This is just the beginning of a long exploratory journey of new technology adoption across industries where cellular-based 3GPP innovation will remain at the technology forefront.

The potential for impact is transformative, and the technologies provide a clear pathway to realizing new ways of working and significant efficiency gains, both of which will be critical in enabling opportunities for manufacturing enterprises to meet sustainability and emissions-reduction ambitions.

The deployment of 5G across the manufacturing value chain, including warehousing and the supply chain beyond the shop floor, will go a long way in addressing long-standing operational challenges including growing demands from customers for faster delivery and more customized products, both of which cannot be met by today’s legacy set ups. According to VoxEU, the total labor productivity growth has consistently stuttered below one percent across both the US and Europe since 2005. The revival and reinvention of manufacturing will be key to changing that trend.

According to a study by Ericsson and Arthur D. Little, ‘Network slicing: Top 10 use cases to target’  the smart factory market size is expected to grow from USD 165 billion in 2019 to USD 250 billion by 2024.

When a network fails it often causes expensive downtime while the issue is resolved. This downtime can be avoided by installing redundant networks. Redundant networks have more than one path for data to travel. If one link in the network is broken, the data can still reach its destination through another path while the broken link is fixed.

When put in those terms, this may sound straightforward. However, designing a redundant network can be a very complex process. Each network design requires a different – even unique – network topology which can be defined by a whole variety of factors such as legacy systems, deployment scenarios, risk tolerance, application demands and many others. With the evolution to smart manufacturing, where every stage of the process must be connected and digitally accessible at all times, the value of network redundancy becomes acute.

5G systems have been designed to meet even the most challenging network robustness requirements from the very beginning, and what’s more remove the troubleshooting complexities associated with fairly common switching failures in traditional proprietary on-premises IT networks.

As this Ericsson Technology Review article describes, a local standalone 5G private network, deployed typically in a manufacturing plant, uses most of the same robustness features and functionalities that are used in a wide-area network deployment. In addition, it also makes it possible to implement a redundancy solution in which every (industrial) device is equipped with two user equipments that are connected either to a single robust network or to two parallel sets of local network partitions without any common failure points. And, with that, complexities are reduced significantly.

Put simply, more redundancy and better distributed site management equals more reliability. And with a network design that ensures a device can automatically take over where another fails greatly reduces the probability that a failure will take the network down and grind factory operations to a halt.

Here are the key benefits of ensuring network redundancy in manufacturing operations:

Find out the state of play for connected manufacturing

There are several methods for creating a redundant network, and they all require careful network planning and deployment. Some methods are standard across all manufacturers of networking components, and some methods are proprietary to specific vendors. Each method has both advantages and disadvantages, depending on the perspective. For example, some methods are less reliable but easier to set up. And some methods have virtually zero switchover time but require extra wiring and expensive components that support the protocol. Of all network redundancy designs, the most reliable ones involve the simplest configuration on the fewest number of devices.

When planning network redundancy, it’s important to shift the focus from node level to network level yet still think about all of the ways a network can fail. As part of this approach, it’s important to have a solid understanding of the needs of the most demanding applications on the network.

With those considerations in mind, there are several key questions which enterprise leaders will need to explore before deciding on a network redundancy design. These include:

So which redundancy model will reign supreme across all smart manufacturing plants in the coming years?

At Ericsson, we believe the convergence of cellular 5G systems with wired Ethernet-based time-sensitive networking (TSN) delivers the most optimal redundant network design for today’s manufacturing enterprises, offering fully deterministic end-to-end connectivity, and meeting all key requirements on industrial communication technology. We believe this model will be essential to realizing all major industrial automation use cases in the future.

TSN is a set of IEEE 802 standards that enables Ethernet networks to give quality of service (QoS) guarantees for time-sensitive and/or mission-critical traffic and applications, including manufacturing operations. When converged with 3GPP’s standard for ultra-reliability and ultra-low latency communication (URLCC), the integrated time synchronization of both networks delivers a highly redundant network topology with complementing high deterministic connectivity features. This is realized through a common reference time for industrial end points which enables bounded low latency. The disjoint forwarding paths of the 5G and TSN segments are also aligned to provide end-to-end ultra-reliability and high availability.

With multiple, synchronized pathways between the two network systems, today’s manufacturers have a reliable and innovative toolkit to build tomorrow’s smart manufacturing centers.

Take a technical look at the role of 5G-TSN integration in meeting networking requirements for industrial automation in this Ericsson Technology Review article. Alternatively, learn more about the robustness mechanisms which make the 5G system the most resilient in the game.

Learn how the integration of 5G and time-sensitive networking (TSN) can help develop the smart factories of the future.

Find out how network operations can make 5G systems as resilient as they can be for business and mission-critical services.

Explore the market potential for smart manufacturing use cases in Ericsson’s Network slicing: Top 10 use cases to target report. Or learn about your own revenue possibilities in Ericsson’s smart manufacturing value calculator.

Read Ericsson’s Connected Manufacturing Report.

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