Industrial environments constitute a challenge in terms of radio propagation
due to the presence of machinery and the mobility of the different agents,
especially at mmWave bands. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a
FR2 5G network deployed in an operational factory scenario at 26 GHz. The
experimental characterization, performed with autonomous mobile robots that
self-navigate the industrial lab, leads to the analysis of the received power
along the factory and the evaluation of reference path gain models. The
proposed assessment deeply analyzes the physical layer of the communication
network under operational conditions. Thus, two different network
configurations are assessed by measuring the power received in the entire
factory, providing a comparison between deployments. Additionally, beam
management procedures, such as beam recovery, beam sweeping or beam switching,
are analyzed since they are crucial in environments where mobile agents are
involved. They aim for a zero interruption approach based on reliable
communications. The results analysis shows that beam recovery procedures can
perform a beam switching to an alternative serving beam with power losses of
less than 1.6 dB on average. Beam sweeping analysis demonstrates the prevalence
of the direct component in Line-of-Sight conditions despite the strong
scattering component and large-scale fading in the environment.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure