Digital Transformation of Oil & Gas Fields Architecting Multi-Services Digital Private Network on 5G NR-U Model
Arpitha H. S, Anand K. R, Balabhaskar Gullapalli · 2022 IEEE Wireless Antenna and Microwave Symposium (WAMS) · 2022
A compelling need for Real Time decision making with detection, diagnosis & resolution of key industry related parameters from Industrial assets enabled with Digital Twins in hyper connectivity with IoT & low latency requirements as a primary driver for digitization of private industry. Focus on Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0 with industry Digital Transformation solution is architected on Connectivity, Command, Control, Compute and Cyber Secure enabled industrial process control operations (5C Solution). 5G technology is chosen for its inherent high bandwidth capability and low latency features enabled by Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and cloudification architecture with virtualization-based solution. Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics with high reliability and high availability architectures are chosen as critical features. 5G New Radio - Unlicensed (NR-U) spectrum considered for realizing dense Radio Access Network (RAN) solution with Inter-site Distances (ISD) varying from 500mtrs to 1km with Rx sensitivity of upto −95dBm to enable the connectivity to distributed oil & gas field assets. 5G coverage design of the network is done with focus on interference minimization, neighbor relation management, load balancing and parameter optimization. Converged Connectivity Network with Industrial Automation Bus (IAB) based architecture is proposed to be realized with Digital Communication network Gateway (DCG) covering the functions of Operational and Information Technology (OT/IT). Oil & Gas industry's 3Rs (Rigs, Reservoirs & Refineries) with varying bandwidths - 10kbps to 1Gbps is supported by 5G NR-U RAN with Adaptive Antenna System (AAS) and beamforming technology using 4×4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), 40/80MHz channel Bandwidth, 256 DL-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and latency requirements from - 100msec to 1msec enabled by MEC are met with use cases of process sensors, drones, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV), Industrial robot (IR), Augment Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) and Mission Critical Services (MCS) with highest degree of built-in cyber security.