5G ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) is one of the three major technical scenarios of 5G. It provides millisecond-level wireless communication latency and 99.999% reliability communication indicators, and is considered as a feasible technology to support key tasks such as autonomous driving and industrial automation. URLLC will open up vertical industries and support the construction of new industrialization. Academia and industry have given great efforts to the implementation of 5G URLLC, and have carried out a large number of demonstration to validate the effectiveness in different industries. However, the large-scale commercial use of 5G URLLC remains to be further verified. Therefore, 5G URLLC is the focus of current 5.5G and even future 6G research.

In order to promote the application of 5G URLLC, researchers from the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, built a software-defined industrial 5G experimental platform based on the field-level industrial 5G control network WIA-NR technology to support various types of industrial control experiments.

First, the research team compared and analyzed the differences in rate, real-time, reliability, and application scenarios between industrial wired networks such as Profinet and industrial wireless networks such as URLLC. Then, taking robotic teleoperation as an example, the communication requirements of different teleoperation modes including supervisory control, one-way open-loop control and two-way closed-loop control were analyzed, and three challenges faced by URLLC-based industrial control are given, including  QoS guarantee for the interconnection of heterogeneous industrial network, adaptation of URLLC and industrial protocols, URLLC for high-precision control. To address the above challenges, a wireless air interface protocol stack based on industrial 5G was designed, a software-defined hardware architecture was given, and a "human-in-the-loop" robotic teleoperation closed-loop feedback control experiment was carried out to evaluate the latency of communication and the transparency of control.

The results showed that the platform can achieve millisecond-level latency and more than 99.999% reliability, supporting tactile wireless teleoperation, wherein the transparency is similar to that of wired teleoperation. Finally, the technical challenges and future research issues towards 6G were discussed.

The research team focuses on the integration and innovation of 5G and industrial manufacturing technology. In recent years, the team has made progress in the protocol design, heterogeneous protocol adaptation, standard formulation and system verification of industrial 5G. The results have been published in IEEE Network, Engineering and other international journals.