5G NSA and SA Campus Network Testbeds for Evaluating Industrial Automation

Abstract:
The 5th generation of cellular networks (5G) enables a wide variety of new use cases for wireless networks in the industrial domain. Both 5G non-stand-alone (NSA) and 5G stand-alone (SA) network architectures can be employed as part of wide area networks, but also as non-public networks which are also referred to as campus networks. These campus networks cover a restricted area, operate in dedicated spectrum, and thus can provide high reliability and data privacy to address the needs of industrial automation. In this paper, we introduce flexible 5G NSA and SA campus network testbeds that fit into a portable container. The testbeds consist only of commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The introduced testbeds are standard-conform, robust, and transparent, and can thus be readily reproduced with generally available resources following the blueprint provided by this article. The described 5G campus network testbeds thus enable network performance testing for a wide range of 5G NSA and 5G SA wireless communication settings, whereby the described 5G NSA testbed is also able to serve the 4th generation of cellular networks. We outline the wide scope of tests and measurements that are enabled by the introduced testbeds, including tests of the feasibility of satisfying industrial communication requirements with 5G campus networks.