From industrial robots and autonomous vehicles to smart manufacturing and other closed-loop cyber-physical systems, many emerging applications rely on wireless communication to carry sensing, control, and coordination traffic under tight timing and reliability requirements. In these real-time mission-critical systems (RT-MCSs), correct operation depends not only on functional correctness but also on whether messages are delivered within predictable and bounded time. This talk examines how 5G networks can move from best-effort wireless service toward deterministic networking for RT-MCSs. Using 5G radio access as a representative wireless domain, I will discuss how flow scheduling, deadline-aware resource allocation, and resource partitioning can work together to mitigate contention and improve timing predictability, thereby meeting end-to-end timing requirements. The talk aims to highlight both the challenges and opportunities in building 5G networks to support the next generation of real-time, mission-critical applications.

Tianyu Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. Prior to IU, he was a postdoc fellow in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut. He received his joint Ph.D. from Northeastern University, China, and the University of Notre Dame. His research is broadly in the area of real-time cyber-physical systems (CPSs), with recent focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of resource management and scheduling frameworks for emerging Industrial Internet-of-Things systems, including industrial 5G, time-sensitive networking (TSN), and wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs).