ISM band Integrated Distributed Antenna Systems for Industry 4.0: A Techno-Economic Analysis

Industries are moving towards automated monitoring and maintenance, and a single wireless technology cannot fulfill all the requirements to meet industrial demands. To achieve the desired capacity and coverage, a distributed antenna system -based multi-band heterogeneous network architecture is proposed, comprised of Long-Term Evolution networks; wireless local area networks; and industrial, scientific, and medical-band technologies such as long-range wide area network and radiofrequency identification. The proposed network model would enable industrial applications ranging from low- to high-power, low- to high-frequency, and short- to long-range communication regimes. The technical and economic feasibility of the network is analyzed through techno-economic analysis (TEA) with a nuclear power plant automation case study. Network performance is estimated through an ns-3 simulator for different data transmissions. TEA results showed that the proposed network architecture is feasible and profitable for the cases presented in this paper.