Empowering Smart Factories With Open RAN
André C. Drummond, Osman Tugay Başaran, Abhishek Dandekar, Max Franke, Mihail Balanici, Iulisloi Zacarias, Ítalo Brasileiro, Cao Vien Phung, Ehsan Tohidi, Naveed Kaim Khani, Sepideh Kouhini, Lorenzo Miretti, Zoran Utkovski, Emre Durmaz, Julius Schulz-Zander, Setareh Maghsudi, Stefan Schmid, Falko Dressler, Behnam Shariati, Johannes Fischer · IEEE Communications Standards Magazine · 2025
It is envisioned that 6G mobile networks will enhance and majorly empower the Industry 4.0 paradigm, evolving towards smart factories with optimized and customized services. Especially the smart factory scenario with real-time and high-capacity data communication presents us with new challenges, both in communications (mmW/sub-THz) and networking. This article discusses these new challenges and proposes extensions to the current Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) standards for 6G networks to enable further evolution of Industry 4.0 and beyond. We motivate the need for real-time functionalities in Open RAN and an extended interface to the user equipment (UE) to allow for its fine-grained control.