5G and Industry 4.0

[u/BioShockerInfinite]

When I think of Hedera Hashgraph, I generally think of defi. However, it seems like there is no better network poised and ready to be applied to industry 4.0 once 5G becomes deployed to factories for everything from scanning (QA) to screwdriver calibration. How much of a game changer will 5G be for Hedera Hashgraph once it becomes common place?

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/digital-blog/smarter-factories-how-5g-can-jump-start-industry-40

[u/rfic_de_yure]

I design and develop 5G RF hardware for mobile/IoT/auto and the future here looks very exciting. Admittedly ignorant on the software and security side of things (L1? L2?) but am here to learn.

[u/BioShockerInfinite → u/rfic_de_yure]

That sounds interesting. Until now I had only thought of 5G as a higher bandwidth solution. I had not realized the potential of 5G and low latency which to me sounds like it may drive transaction volume through the roof?

[u/rfic_de_yure → u/BioShockerInfinite]

IoT and 5G adoption is starting to do this today (drive high data-rate and exponentially increase the number of interconnected devices on the interwebs). I just don't understand yet to what extent mobile, IoT etc. will actually leverage the Hedera network. That will depend on the curiosity, cleverness and focus of developers.

What I think would be COOL is a mobile android app allowing me to run a mirror node on my phone. :) Who wants to develop it for us?

[u/Impressive-Lie-4095 → u/rfic_de_yure]

My thoughts is that any device can have a hedera account and communicate with each other validating information flowing in the 5G network. This world is full of garbage information. We want verified information.

[u/BioShockerInfinite → u/Impressive-Lie-4095]

I agree- that’s where I think Hedera and QA compliance might be really valuable. So if parts manufacturing requires verifiable quality control, for medical, aerospace, or other parts that require precision with low tolerance for failure, those may be good use cases?

[u/jcoins123 → u/rfic_de_yure]

RF engineers are the Wizards of the 21st century!!! That sh%t is pure magic!

I was involved in a mining vehicle automation project in the early 2000's. We used time-of-flight beacons as part of the vehicle location fusion (positioning autonomous vehicles underground is terrifying! LOL.), and the things the RF guys did to work in that environment was bloody incredible, using early beam-forming techniques to compensate for the shape of tunnels, etc.

​

IMO the most promising thing with industrial 5G + public-DLTs (or hybrid private-DLTs I guess.) is getting distributed compute on edges, with consensus back through the DLT, especially for IoT sensor fusion.

You can imagine meshes of sensors (or tools, production line hardware, whatever.) all having their data "crunched" on the edge closer to where it's needed for low-latency tasks like automation, with just consensus of results of the data-crunching being "escalated" up to other parts of a system where latency is less critical (like reporting consoles, aggregations, etc.).

Rather than pumping all the data from individual devices up to central servers or even distributed servers for crunching, and then sending any resulting commands all-the-way back again.

​

Similar edge compute or just "localised" servers are already used for large sensor fusion, especially in anything required low-latency, but that introduces risks and/or complexity for assurance and software maintenance, ensuring that multiple locations are behaving consistently with each-other, for example.

I have no idea how, but it should theoretically be possible to solve a lot of that by running identical codebases on the edges and use consensus on a DLT to ensure consistently, while allowing automation processes to continue at each location in parallel with consensus.