Remote Monitoring of a Smart Factory Over an Intercontinental Link: Vistas from Etri-Oulu Collaboration Project

While the fifth generation (5G) New Radio wireless system is being deployed across the globe, the wireless research community has started exploring what will the sixth generation (6G) be? 6G is expected to cater to societal and economic needs by integrating the biological, physical, and virtual worlds with the networks. The notion of multi-service communication introduced in 5G will be further diversified and expanded to include new service classes representing novel and emerging use cases that were not considered as a part of the 5G landscape. Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and their evolution in 6G are of particular interest given their prominent role in enabling future industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. During 2020-2022, ETRI from South Korea and the University of Oulu from Finland convened a joint project to explore URLLC evolution towards the 6G era. This article summarizes the key highlights of the project and outlines its main findings. The project involved a study of future URLLC service classes and their potential enablers, along with a demonstration of remote monitoring of a smart factory over an intercontinental link. The project's proof-of-concept was able to demonstrate remote monitoring of ETRI's IIoT testbed from Finland at sub-300 ms service round trip time.