Provisioning of high throughput millimetre-wave signal to indoor areas that potentially serve a large number of users, such as transportation hubs or convention centres, will require dedicated indoor millimetre-wave access point deployments. In this article, we study dense deployments of millimetre-wave access points mounted on the ceiling, and illuminating selected spots on the ground with the use of fixed directional antennas. In this setup, the main factor limiting signal propagation are blockages by human bodies. We evaluate our system under a number of scenarios that take into account beamwidth of the main-lobe, access point density, and positioning of the mobile device with respect to the user's body. We find that both coverage and area spectral efficiency curves exhibit non-trivial behaviour which can be classified into four regions related to the selection of access point density, beamwidth, and height values. Furthermore, we observe a trade-off in beamwidth design, as the optimal beamwidth maximizes either coverage or area spectral efficiency, but not both. Finally, when we consider different body shadowing scenarios, our network design optimizes coverage or area spectral efficiency performance towards either devices held in hand or worn directly against the body, as each of the scenarios requires mutually exclusive settings of access point density and beamwidth.

Industry 5.0 envisions close cooperation between humans and machines requiring ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC). The Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has the potential to play a crucial role in realizing wireless URLLC for Industry 5.0. IRS is forecast to be a key enabler of 6G wireless communication networks as it can significantly improve wireless network performance by creating a controllable radio environment. In this paper, we first provide an overview of IRS technology and then conceptualize the potential for IRS implementation in a future smart manufacturing environment to support the emergence of Industry 5.0 with a series of applications. Finally, to stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, and opportunities of IRS technology in modern smart manufacturing.

Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in today’s industry. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring, controlling, and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communication protocols and their performance to meet application requirements. Particularly, wireless communication is becoming an integral part of modern smart manufacturing and is expected to play an important role in achieving the goals of smart manufacturing. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research in wireless communication technologies for smart manufacturing.

The objective of the Enhanced Mobile Broadband use case in 5G networks is to deliver high capacity access to densely populated areas, like city centres, transportation hubs or convention centres. Millimetre-wave communications are the go-to technology to realise that objective, yet due to weak outdoor-to-indoor penetration, outdoor deployments will not suffice and dedicated indoor deployments will be necessary. In this article, we study dense deployments of millimetre-wave access points mounted on the ceiling, with directional antennas pointing downwards to illuminate selected spots on the ground. In this setup, the signal propagation is primarily limited by human body blockages. Therefore, we develop a body blockage model and derive an expression for the probability of blockage. Using the developed expressions and our simulation framework, we assess the impact of densification and body blockage on the achievable performance. We find that both coverage and area spectral efficiency curves exhibit non-trivial behaviour with respect to the access point density and that there is an optimal beamwidth-density configuration that only maximises either coverage or area spectral efficiency. Such optimal configuration changes depending on the body blockage probability, leading to a necessity for network designers to carefully consider their intended application and scenario.

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