Dependable wireless communications is considered to be one of the key enablers for digital, flexible, and smart production systems in industry. However, what are the design requirements of industrial radio systems (IRSs) if highly dependable industrial applications are to be implemented with them? Does an IRS need to guarantee maximum packet loss rates on a link level of, e.g., 10⁻⁹? Are new and more precise performance metrics and design approaches needed to characterize, evaluate, and improve radio access technologies to become reliable for ultra-dependable and time-critical industrial applications? This chapter highlights selected aspects and approaches to assist in finding answers to these questions.

The existing terms and metrics of dependability theory and their definitions are often used and interpreted incorrectly in the context of wireless communications. Therefore, this chapter first explains and applies in Sect. 1 the basic dependability metrics related to wireless industrial communications scenarios. Multi-connectivity offers a variety of diversity schemes and is therefore seen as a very promising approach for designing dependable IRS. Section 2 explains the fundamentals as well as the potential of multi-connectivity on the physical layer (PHY) level. Wireless control is a key challenge in wireless automation. Currently communications-based control systems are optimized in the two domains of control (closed or open loop control) and (wireless) communications. As a result, the opportunities of a joint design, especially for improving its application dependability, remain unused. The last section (Sect. 3) describes the different existing and partly contradictory approaches of networked control system (NCS) and ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC). Ultimately, the pathways toward a control-communications co-design (CoCoCo) approach and its positive impact on the dependability of industrial applications are shown.