SHARP: Implementation of a Hybrid Wired-Wireless TSN Network to Enable Flexible Smart Factories

This paper discusses an implementation of a wireless-wired TSN network, named SHARP, which delivers hard real-time capabilities with bounded latencies of hundreds of microseconds and clock synchronization with tens of nanosecond accuracy along both wired and wireless segments. It has been demonstrated that the network is able to maintain the most important TSN services in various situations of critical real-time and non-critical traffic in the context of a representative Industry 4.0 application. The communication solution presented here is expected to pave the way for massive digitization of future flexible smart factories, especially when combined with other technologies to be commercially available in the short-medium term like 5G.