5G MEC Gateway System Design and Application in Industrial Communication

Abstract

In industrial production, mass data transmission and processing are required with an increase in production data, which causes large-scale and complicated wiring in the manufacturing industry. However, it is difficult to achieve improved performance through traditional wireless communication technologies. 5G, a leading communication technology, with its Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (uRLLC) combined with Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), provides huge potential for the service with requirements for higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more computation. The Local Area Network type (LAN-type) Service supported by the 5G system reduces the net distance, which further decreases latency and provides data security. Based on this, in this paper, a 5G MEC gateway system is proposed to realize local wireless communication in a factory. The gateway system includes an intranet Address Resolution Mechanism, which is designed to resolve User Equipment IP addresses, a MEC server, which acts as a switch for packets broadcasting, and network tunnels, which are established between gateways to transmit data in the 5G LAN. In addition, the implemented testbed includes Raspberry Pi, which acts as the gateway, and the OpenVPN server, which runs in the MEC. Finally, two cases are shown to transfer Profinet and OPC UA data with this system.