Wireless Communication Systems in Industrial Applications
Summary
Wireless communication has become integral to modern industrial environments, offering mobility, ease of deployment and a reduction in cabling costs. Industrial use cases span factory automation, process control, robotics and autonomous vehicles, each imposing stringent requirements on latency, reliability and determinism. Advances in 5G New Radio and developments towards 6G envisage sub-millisecond cycle times and ultra-high reliability, enabling closed-loop control at the sensor-actuator level. Complementary approaches such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) over wireless media aim to extend deterministic Ethernet standards into the radio domain, while non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes promise enhanced spectral efficiency and support for massive device connectivity. Challenges in industrial sites include multipath fading, electromagnetic interference, harsh propagation conditions and security threats such as jamming. To mitigate these, research explores adaptive relaying, redundancy, real-time quality-of-service mechanisms and integrated network architectures that combine public and private network resources. The global drive towards Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing emphasises not only technical performance but also interoperability, scalability and energy efficiency, laying the foundation for more flexible, resilient and cognisant production systems.
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Wireless Communication Systems in Industrial Applications publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in wireless communication systems in industrial applications across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN): A set of IEEE standards providing deterministic, low-latency and high-reliability packet forwarding over bridged networks, extended to wireless contexts.
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA): A radio access technique allowing multiple users to share the same frequency and time resources through power or code differentiation to improve spectral efficiency.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): The deployment of connected sensors, actuators and analytics platforms in industrial settings to enable real-time monitoring, control and optimisation.
Outage probability: The likelihood that a communication link’s signal-to-noise ratio falls below a required threshold, leading to failure in meeting quality-of-service targets.
Public Network Integrated Non-Public Network (PNI-NPN): A hybrid architecture where private industrial networks leverage public cellular infrastructure to deliver dedicated connectivity slices with guaranteed performance and isolation.
References
- A Comprehensive Survey of Wireless Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN): Architecture, Technologies, Applications, and Open Issues. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (2024).
- Dealing With Jamming Attacks in Uplink Pairwise NOMA Using Outage Analysis, Smart Relaying, and Redundant Transmissions. IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (2023).
- Towards 6G in-X Subnetworks With Sub-Millisecond Communication Cycles and Extreme Reliability. IEEE Access (2020).
- Industrial Internet of Things over 5G: A Practical Implementation. Sensors (2023).
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