Now, with basic understanding of industrial IoT in mind, a question might have popped up in some of your minds. That is, is industrial IoT just about IoT or massive IoT in 5G parlance or is it something beyond that? As it turns out, industrial IoT is much more than just massive IoT. Remember, some of the 5G service classes, we had learned about earlier such as massive IoT, enhanced mobile broadband, and ultra-reliable low latency communication or URLLC. Well, there are certain paradigms or use cases in industrial IoT that lie squarely within the realm of massive IoT, but more interestingly, there are many other use cases and applications that are actually under confluence of two or more of the service classes that 5G offers. What do I mean by that? Well, let's look at an example of the first category wherein consider industrial sensors. A typical industrial plant might look like what you see in the background here. It is just full of metallic reflective machinery, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Some of the components might not be stationary either. They might be moving as a function of time. What kind of use cases we can see in a typical industry such as this? Well, there may be hundreds or even thousands of sensors. Some of those sensors will be located in challenging coverage conditions, but would still be expected to function as if everything is fine. Furthermore, many of those sensors will be battery operated and they will be expected to survive on the same battery supply for days, weeks, or even months on it, if not more. That use case, as you can see that of sensors, is squarely under the realm of massive IoT. But what about certain other use cases? Imagine security cameras, for example. We know that our security cameras continuously feed high-definition video feed back to the controller. It is definitely an eMBB use case. No doubt about that. But keep in mind at the same time, some of those security cameras might be located in challenging coverage conditions. For example, at the end of a narrow hallway or on the outer periphery of your industrial park. Places wherein your wireless network coverage may not be as strong as it may be inside your factory or towards the center of your factory. As such, even though they have eMBB like properties, those cameras may be expected to be able to operate under challenging coverage conditions. That puts the use case squarely at the intersection of massive IoT and eMBB. There is another use case of automated guided vehicles or AGV. These are essentially autonomous robots that can largely function on their own. But in order to go from one point to another intermittently, they might need some human interaction in the form of commands, requests, and responses. As you can tell, some of these AGVs will require millisecond-level latency because a few milliseconds of delay in conveying the correct information to the automated guided vehicle can be the difference between that AGV turning into the right aisle of the industry or the warehouse versus it turning into the wrong aisle and that could be the difference between efficient operation versus inefficient operation. AGVs are going to require millisecond-level latencies which put them squarely under the realm of URLLC. But at the same time keep in mind that the wireless conditions are going from the private gNodeB to your AGV may not always be ideal. Sometimes the AGV might be in a narrow lane between two tall shelves that are floor to ceiling stacked with different boxes. At such, the wireless channel quality for that AGV, at least at that instance, is going to be very poor. In such conditions, the AGV, nonetheless, is going to be required to have the ability to provide such millisecond-level accuracy while operating in challenging coverage conditions. That is what puts this particular use case at the confluence of massive IoT and URLLC. You can make similar arguments about many different use cases we have seen earlier. At the end of the day what you'll realize is that very few use cases in industrial IoT are cut and dry in that they fall squarely under one or the other service class. A majority of the interesting use cases in industrial IoT are rather under confluence of two or even more of the service classes that 5G offers, such as eMBB, massive IoT, and URLLC. Now that we have gone one more step further into looking at how 5G private networks will interplay with industrial IoT, let's do what we always have, in that, try to translate some of these theoretical concepts and understanding that we have gotten so far into practical terms. Let's now look at what are some of the practical deployment-related considerations that network operators or private network owners will have to grapple with when the time comes to deploy a private network in an industrial paradigm.
