Despite significant advances in wireless technology, the manufacturing industry continues to turn to wired forms of communication such as Ethernet or fiber optics for its most critical tasks. A new study by Cristina Cano and the full professor Xavier Vilajosana, researchers from the Wireless Networks (WiNe) group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), opens the door to the use of wireless technologies with power and reliability that are comparable to fiber optics and that could replace cabled connections. The research project, published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, has created the first parameterization of a millimeter-band signal propagation model, a wireless technology capable of transmitting a huge amount of data per second, in an industrial environment. According to the researchers, this new model is the first step towards understanding how this type of signal behaves in an industrial plant and could have a significant impact on the development of Industry 4.0.
