Rapidly emerging autonomous and interconnected transport systems (road vehicles and trains), the need for dynamically reconfigurable production lines in collaborative human-robot scenarios of Industry 4.0, and the wide range of applications linking sensors, actuators, and processing units (Internet of Things) have created a huge demand for 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) which provide 1 ms latency at low frame error rates.

At AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, a comprehensive 5G research focus on URLLC has been established in recent years to address the main scientific challenges of 5G technology designs and deployments for automation and control of precise production processes, and for the security requirements of autonomous vehicles in urban environments or on high-speed railway tracks. For this purpose, the wireless communications research group has bundled technological expertise in the fields of (i) distributed massive MIMO systems, (ii) mmWave band (above 28 GHz) technology in combination with beamforming and optically-fed remote passive radio heads (Optical/RF Interface), and (iii) investigations in wireless signal propagation through channel measurement, characterization, and numerical geometry based modelling.

With the presentation of a scalable, mobile multi-node channel sounder, AIT has paved the way to measure the multi-path effect of signals caused by terrain and obstacles in vehicular relaying scenarios. And lastly, with its innovative 5G URLLC developments, AIT is also seeking to fix the energy efficiency problem in future-proofed 5G/6G mobile infrastructures.