Kathy Gibson reports from CeBIT, Hanover – ICT will enable the new phase of the industrial revolution, Industry 4.0.
Lida Yan, president of the Huawei Business Group, says Huawei has discovered the power of combining its telecommunications, mobile and consumer technologies.
For example, an eLTE solution can enhance railway operations by ensuring that locomotives on the same train operate in synchronisation. Meanwhile, cloud technologies let media houses make their production facilities much more flexible.
By leveraging the business groups, Huawei has been able to introduce a number of innovations on the mobile product line as well, Yan says.
The industrial Internet is the foundation of Industry 4.0, he adds.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and internet-based system and service platforms are the basis of Industry 4.0, says Yan, and this is where Huawei operates.
“We believe the current ICT infrastructure needs to be deconstructed,” he says.
The major differences between Industry 3.0 and Industry 4.0, Yan adds, are that in Industry 3.0, ICT offers embedded, siloed systems and self-control. In Industry 4.0, what’s needed are open platforms, connected machines and unified control.
But there are a number of challenges to achieving the ideals of Industry 4.0.
“The first is the scale of connections,” says Yan. “There are 7-billion people on the planet, which has necessitated billions of connections. But the scale for Industry 4.0 will be hundreds of billions of connections. In addition, some of the connected devices will demand high bandwidth, and diverse interfaces and protocols.”
The second challenge, he says, is latency. “Mission-critical data will be communicated between machines, so a latency of 1 millisecond or less is needed.”
The last, but possibly the most critical challenge is that of ICT infrastructure, according to Yan. “There is no common infrastructure; there are no common standards; and it is difficult to interconnect among different vertical markets, which makes it difficult to exchange information.”
To overcome these challenges, there is a need for ICT and industrial players to collaborate, he adds, which is why Huawei has taken an open stance to co-operate with partners to drive innovation.
The company has proposed an architecture to enable Industry 4.0 and plans to work with partners to achieve this.
“At the bottom, we need smart devices, enabling a massive number of M2M connections,” Yan says. “Above this is a Smart IoT Gateway, which is able to connect diversified interfaces and protocols.
An important element is the wide area network which will eventually run on 5G and software-defined networks offering realtime mobile broadband and agile networking.
The smart connection platform will drive a multi-application collaboration on distributed platforms, essentially virtualising all the devices in the stack.
To help make the ideal a reality, Yan says Huawei is working on LTE-M – a version of LTE specially designed for machines – that will offer better coverage and up to 10 000 connections with lower power consumption.
This will most effectively bridge the gap between current systems and 5G, which should be a reality by about 2020 and will be able to handle 1 000-times more connections that 4G, with 50-times lower latency and 66-times the speed.
In addition, the company has developed the Smart IoT Gateway, which has the ability to connect up to 17 different devices, Yan says. It offers multi-protoc0l unified access and a smart data processing platform.
Importantly, Yan points out that Huawei is partnering to drive innovation, with its business-driven ICT Infrastructure Innovation model. “The company works with partners to understand vertical industries and their needs.”
