Distributed Antenna System in 3GPP Specified Industrial Environment

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 are used interchangeably while talking about the revolution in the field of manufacturing and logistic industries. IIoT is a digital ecosystem of connected devices, machines, equipment, and robots that communicate with each other without or with minimum human intervention. The 28 GHz band and 60 GHz band are two lucrative Millimeter Wave (mmWave) bands for 5G, and are getting popular since they enable standalone private network for IIoT. To ensure the successful deployment of IIoT in practice, we need to revisit our understanding of the radio channel characteristics at target frequencies in Indoor Factory (InF) environments. In this paper, we have considered three operating frequencies i.e., 3.5 GHz, 28 GHz and 60 GHz, and we investigate the performance of several Distributed Antenna System (DAS) and non-DAS layouts in 3GPP specified InF environment that is characterized by high density of blockers. The performance of the system is quantified in terms of received power, SINR, outage ratio, application layer throughput, and system capacity. The system performance is analyzed with Three-Dimensional (3D) Ray Tracing (RT) simulations. The acquired simulation results and related discussion provided in this paper gives insightful information about the communication properties in an indoor industrial environment.