Augmented Reality-Empowered Network Planning Services for Private Networks

To support Industry 4.0 applications with haptics and human-machine interaction, the sixth generation (6G) requires a new framework that is fully autonomous, visual, and interactive. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for private network planning services, providing an end-to-end solution that receives visual and sensory data from the user device, reconstructs the 3D network environment and performs network planning on the server, and visualizes the network performance with augmented reality (AR) on the display of the user devices. The solution is empowered by three key technical components: 1) vision- and sensor fusion-based 3D environment reconstruction, 2) ray tracing-based radio map generation and network planning, and 3) AR-empowered network visualization enabled by real-time camera relocalization. We conducted the proof-of-concept in a Bosch plant in Germany and showed good network coverage of the optimized antenna location, as well as high accuracy in both environment reconstruction and camera relocalization. We also achieved real-time AR-supported network monitoring with an end-to-end latency of about 32 ms per frame.