The Potential of mmWaves in Smart Industry: Manufacturing at 60 GHz

Industry is experiencing a new evolution phase where manufacturing is going through a process of digitalization, with every step of the production chain becoming smart. The emergence of IoT technologies and the fasted-paced evolution in advanced computing capabilities enable a pervasive monitoring and rapid data processing, unleashing new applications, e.g., real-time error-correction and fault-detection, remote robot control, intelligent logistics. The flexibility and low cost of wireless solutions makes them appealing with respect to wired connections, but current wireless technologies operate at sub-6-GHz bands and are not able to meet the reliability, latency, and data rate demands of novel applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the main limits of current technologies and discuss the role that mmWaves may play in guaranteeing ultra reliable and low latency wireless communication in smart industry. We especially focus on the IEEE 802.11ad and 802.11ay standards for communication at 60 GHz. A factory work-cell is used as an illustrative example to explore the potential of mmWaves and how they could contribute to the realization of a resilient smart factory.