An Exhaustive Measurement Data Set for Time-Varying Radio Channels in a Running Industrial Factory

Modern, industrial automation is unthinkable without wireless communications. Thereby, wireless links provide the necessary flexibility for industrial real-time applications. On the other side, these applications need at the  same time a wireless communications link that works ultra-reliably. In communications systems, unreliability can be traced back to the fading behavior of the wireless radio channel as the medium between the communicating entities. Understanding not only the statistical but also the temporal characteristics on both large-scale and small-scale is therefore a crucial step to design and finally deploy reliable radio systems in industrial environments. We therefore provide an exhaustive channel measurement data set that was recorded in the context of a measurement campaign carried out in a real-world and running industrial factory  environment. By using an automated, mobile measurement system, the resulting, spatial measurement resolution is in the order of millimeters while the different, measured scenarios cover propagation distances reaching from 2 to 30 meters with different Line of Sight (LOS) characteristics. Thereby, the data set is not only suited to derive large-scale parameters but is equally useful to investigate the time-varying characteristics of the radio channel. On top of that, a variety of antenna polarizations where equipped during the measurements to conduct potential evaluations on spatial and polarization diversity and the same measurement scenarios where repeated over time. Thereby, the data set is well-suited to study the long-term consistency of radio channels in real-world, industrial environments in the future.