5GSmartFact: Time Sensitive Network (TSN) over wireless networks in industrial environment, by UPC PhD student Suneel Kumar

5GSmartFact is an MSCA-ITN project funded by the EU whose objective is to work at the crossroads of factory automation and 5G evolution. We aim for a complete redesign of robot architectures that will lead to a leap forward in the industry automationThe project started in March 2021.

14 PhD students were hired at the beginning of the project, with different kinds of background (robotics, telecom engineering, …) and complementary PhD projects related with wireless communications and robotics. ESR (upc.edu).
In industrial environments, devices operate under a diverse set of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as strict delay bounds and high reliability. For example, safety-critical communication (like emergency shutdowns) may require end-to-end delays under 5 ms, while collaborative robots often operate with delay bounds of 10–20 ms to ensure real-time
interaction with humans and machines. Guaranteeing these SLAs over wireless networks remains a key challenge.

To tackle this, UPC PhD Student Suneel Kumar developed SLA-MLO and C-SLA-MLO — novel IEEE 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) multilink schedulers designed to meet SLA requirements in dense industrial Wi-Fi environments. SLA-MLO dynamically assigns traffic to multiple links based on their SLA profiles, while C-SLA-MLO adds coordination mechanisms to further optimize SLA compliance in single-BSS scenarios. He later extended this work to multi-BSS (OBSS) environments, where he implemented Access Point (AP) coordination to reduce inter-BSS interference and enhance performance. This part of his research was conducted at NEC Laboratories Europe in Germany.

Further he shifted his focus to more real industrial conditions, and he worked on integrating the OPC UA PubSub Safety stack and evaluated the FRER (Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability) feature of TSN over Wi-Fi. This work was carried out during a secondment at ABB in Västerås, Sweden, where he developed a Linux namespace-based emulation
environment combining XDP, VXLAN tunnels, and ns-3, enabling end-to-end testing of industrial safety protocols across hybrid networks. He is now in the final phase of his PhD at i2CAT Foundation in Barcelona.

To know more:
Kumar, Suneel, Daniel Camps-Mur, and Eduard Garcia-Villegas. "C-SLA-MLO: enhancing SLA compliance in industrial Wi-Fi through cooperative multilink operation." Internet of Things 27 (2024): 101269. S. Kumar, E. Garcia-Villegas, and D. Camps, "SLA-MLO: Congestion-aware SLA-based scheduling of multiple links in IEEE 802.11be," in 2024 IEEE 21st Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, NV, USA, Jan. 6-9, 2024.

System model illustrating a Single BSS and OBSS environment. Critical industrial flows are served by multilink-capable Wi-Fi devices ensuring SLA compliance, while background traffic is generated by legacy single-link devices.

Collaboration with ABB Corporate Research, Västerås, under the supervision of Dr. Zhibo Pang, together with lab colleagues from the ABB research team

Coordinator: Josep Vidal, UPC.
Consortium
5GSmartFact features a selected consortium of academia (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya,
Aalborg University), research centres (i2Cat, CNRS: Centre National pour la Recherche
Scientifique), 5G companies (NEC, Nokia, Siradel) and expert companies in factory automation
(ABB, Robert Bosch, Ingeniarius, Roboception), together with supporting institutions
(Universidade de Coimbra, Université Paris-Saclay).
Funded by EU within the MSCA ITN program

Project website
Home (upc.edu)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/itn-5gsmartfact
Logo of the 5GSmartFact project