On the Application of 5GNR Bandwidth Parts to Enable Remote Operations in Industrial Metrology

Industrial metrology is used to check dimensional conformance of manufactured parts for quality control of production processes. Today, metrology is implemented using Coordinate Measurement Machines (CMMs) that are deployed in the factory floor and require manual operation from an expert operator. Enabling remote operation of CMM devices across public 5G networks would disrupt the metrology sector, enabling new service models in Industry 5.0. To support remote operation though, 5G networks need to provide a guaranteed service to the traffic flowing between the CMM and the remote operator. In this paper we investigate the use of 5GNR Bandwidth Parts (BWP) as a mechanism to provide these guarantees. To this end, we characterize the traffic generated by remotely operated CMMs, we deploy a BWP-enabled multi-cell factory testbed that resembles a public 5G network, and characterize the impact of the BWP configuration on the performance of the metrology service. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of enabling remote operation of metrology services over public 5G networks.