Performance analysis of a 4G network in an industrial IOT environment

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is having a significant influence in many verticals, and one of the main ones are industrial environments; Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the main enabling components of Industry 4.0 which augment the industrial application scenarios and automation. IIoT aims to interconnect a vast number of mobile devices, manufacturing machines, industrial equipment, and many other components and devices within the industrial sector. Cellular technologies, such as 4G and 5G, are enablers of the IIoT revolution. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of a 4G network within an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environment. To accomplish this, we chose to measure some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Round-Trip Time (RTT) within a specific area at the BI-REX competence center. Many Industrial applications have strong constraints, for example they must have a certain timing in order to work properly, so it's critical for us to understand if the Round-Trip Time is compatible with the application and how it is affected by the industrial environment. In our experiments, we provided 4G connectivity to a Raspberry Pi using a module from Quectel. This setup allowed the Raspberry Pi to communicate with a server connected to the Core Network of the private 4G network deployed at BI-REX. Using this setup, we analyzed the performance of the 4G-based IIoT network.