Industrial automation systems traditionally require communication systems to have
high availability, high security and low latency. This results in efficient protocols
with low protocol-processing overhead, but somewhat rigid communication systems that
are cumbersome to scale up when deployed. On the other hand, Internet Protocol based
communication which is often preferred by IoT systems - offer high flexibility, but
best-effort reliability. Furthermore, various radio access technologies have been
created for IoT devices facilitating their IP networking as well. Nevertheless, these
wireless technologies are rarely capable of corresponding to the strict requirements
of complex industrial use cases, they usually cannot certain the necessary Quality
of Service (QoS) promises.On the contrary, 5G mobile technologies are being developed
exactly for such industrial and automation IoT use cases. Certainly, there are traffic
prioritization techniques available for 4G and 5G systems, but their capabilities
need to be investigated for Industrial IoT feasibility, before deployment. This paper
aims to provide a feasibility study for applying mobile networking technologies (4G
and 5G) - and its QoS guarantees - to IIoT applications. The proposed methodology
can be extended for benchmarking whether a given use case can benefit from applying
mobile networking for its various industrial and automation systems.
