Wireless communication is of paramount importance to enable the vision of Industry 4.0. Compared to mobile communications, industrial communications pose demanding requirements in terms of ultra low latency and high reliability. Currently, for the most time-critical industrial applications, there is no available wireless solutions satisfying these latency requirements. This thesis studies effective techniques to reduce the latency for the time-critical industrial applications, especially from the Physical Layer (PHY) point of view.

The thesis is organized in two main parts. In the first part, the available methods for low latency are surveyed and analyzed in terms of end-to-end latency. It is argued that the enabling techniques should be optimized together to reduce the end-to-end latency while satisfying other requirements such as reliability and throughput. Moreover, the realistic timing constraints of different PHY algorithms, hardware, and mechanisms are derived based on the state-of-art wireless implementations. In the second part, a revision of PHY with an optimized PHY structure is proposed to reduce the latency. It is shown that a PHY with just a short one-symbol preamble and dedicated packet detection and synchronization algorithms for short packets is robust to carrier frequency offsets and false alarms by both theoretical and site experiments.

The investigations of this thesis show that revising the PHY structure/parameters is effective to reduce the packet transmission time, and further improve the latency performance of wireless communication network for time-critical industrial applications. In the future, we include the PHY results of this thesis in the investigation of the Medium Access Control (MAC), for industrial wireless communications with very low latencies.