The 4th Industrial revolution envisions a transition from linear production to highly flexible equipment that offers production customizability with high reliability. One of the key technological enablers for this vision is reliable, low-latency wireless communication, as it will allow for flexible network paths and entirely new use cases such as autonomous mobile robots.

This thesis aims to experimentally investigate the potential of wireless technologies in an I4.0 context and propose, explore, and evaluate enhancements that further strengthen their applicability for challenging use cases.

The thesis's main contributions include the novel experimental framework for integrating wireless solutions in factories used throughout the thesis experiments and company collaborations. Secondly, an overview of how off-the-shelf technologies such as Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G NR Rel. 15 perform in real factory environments when used for stationary equipment and autonomous mobile robots. And finally, how a transport layer multi-connectivity protocol such as MP-QUIC can significantly improve the usability of existing wireless network deployments in factories (primarily Wi-Fi) for challenging use-cases, such as autonomous mobile robots, by enhancing it with a radio-aware scheduling mechanism.