Industrial IoT with Distributed Cloud Experiments using 5G LTE

With the evolution of 5G it is envisioned that industrial applications with different requirements on latency and availability can be offloaded to a distributed cloud infrastructure. For example, some applications with stringent timing requirements can be hosted at the edge of the mobile network, closer to the control hardware, whereas some applications with relaxed timing requirements can be hosted in a cloud located geographically further away.This paper presents a feasibility study of hosting control applications based on OPC UA communication in a distributed cloud with LTE connectivity to the control hardware. The study includes measurements of communication round-trip time and availability of the network comparing cases where the application is hosted at a local or regional cloud. The results indicate that it is feasible to deploy industrial applications in a distributed cloud with timing requirements in the order of 100ms.