Factories, facilities, and other local networks are usually spread across one or several buildings. They could be covered with local WIFI/Bluetooth/ZigBee networks, and local networks may include wireless gateways which act as routers for wireless devices.
But sometimes it's only possible to cover some things with short-range wireless technologies.
For example, it could be reasonable to put multiple ground humidity sensors across huge fields for an agricultural company and monitor remotely when they should enable irrigation systems.
Or, the company may need to gather an air quality index across multiple forests.
In such cases, sensors and smart devices must be autonomous and communicate via a wide range of wireless technology like 5G.
One 5G base station may provide internet access for devices in a range of up to 10km.
Building a private 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) allows for a distributed IoT cloud with highly mobile devices.
This can enable you to build a wireless network that may serve an area of thousands of kilometers of devices.
This approach can be useful for multiple types of applications:
Industrial platforms
Smart driving
Cloud AR gaming
Environmental monitoring
Security systems
To build such a network, you will need a physical 5G RAN infrastructure connected to the cloud provider with IoT services, such as AWS Greengrass.
You can build your RAN using existing GSM/5G provider services or build the physical network infrastructure from scratch and organize a private network (Image 10).
The application is split into two parts, as in Image 11: a private network with a MEC gateway and a VPC on the public cloud.
With such an architecture, edge location can work autonomously, synchronizing the data with the cloud when a secure internet connection is up, making the application more resilient.
With Greengrass IoT, you may control all remote MEC devices, update firmware over the air (OTA) and monitor the status of the whole park of devices, do data backup and visualize it with the grafana or alternatives.
