Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging domain that promises ubiquitous connection to the Internet, turning common objects into connected devices. The IoT paradigm is changing the way people interact with things around them. It paves the way for creating pervasively connected infrastructures to support innovative services and promises better flexibility and efficiency. Such advantages are attractive not only for consumer applications, but also for the industrial domain. Over the last few years, we have been witnessing the IoT paradigm making its way into the industry marketplace with purposely designed solutions. In this paper, we clarify the concepts of IoT, Industrial IoT, and Industry 4.0. We highlight the opportunities brought in by this paradigm shift as well as the challenges for its realization. In particular, we focus on the challenges associated with the need of energy efficiency, real-time performance, coexistence, interoperability, and security and privacy. We also provide a systematic overview of the state-of-the-art research efforts and potential research directions to solve Industrial IoT challenges.

Industrial Internet of Things: Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions

With the application of Internet of Things and services to manufacturing, the fourth stage of industrialization, referred to as Industrie 4.0, is believed to be approaching. For Industrie 4.0 to come true, it is essential to implement the horizontal integration of inter-corporation value network, the end-to-end integration of engineering value chain, and the vertical integration of factory inside. In this paper, we focus on the vertical integration to implement flexible and reconfigurable smart factory. We first propose a brief framework that incorporates industrial wireless networks, cloud, and fixed or mobile terminals with smart artifacts such as machines, products, and conveyors. Then, we elaborate the operational mechanism from the perspective of control engineering, that is, the smart artifacts form a self-organized system which is assisted with the feedback and coordination blocks that are implemented on the cloud and based on the big data analytics. In addition, we outline the main technical features and beneficial outcomes and present a detailed design scheme. We conclude that the smart factory of Industrie 4.0 is achievable by extensively applying the existing enabling technologies while actively coping with the technical challenges.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2016/3159805

Implementing smart factory of Industrie 4.0: an outlook

Technologies to support the Internet of Things are becoming more important as the need to better understand our environments and make them smart increases. As a result it is predicted that intelligent devices and networks, such as WSNs, will not be isolated, but connected and integrated, composing computer networks. So far, the IP-based Internet is the largest network in the world; therefore, there are great strides to connect WSNs with the Internet. To this end, the IETF has developed a suite of protocols and open standards for accessing applications and services for wireless resource constrained networks. However, many open challenges remain, mostly due to the complex deployment characteristics of such systems and the stringent requirements imposed by various services wishing to make use of such complex systems. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the current approaches to standardization in this area can be improved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the IoT field. To this end, this article presents an overview of current standards and research activities in both industry and academia.

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A survey on the ietf protocol suite for the internet of things: standards, challenges, and opportunities

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are the next generation of engineered systems in which computing, communication, and control technologies are tightly integrated. Research on CPSs is fundamentally important for engineered systems in many important application domains such as transportation, energy, and medical systems. We overview CPS research from both a historical point of view in terms of technologies developed for early generations of control systems, as well as recent results on CPSs in many relevant research domains such as networked control, hybrid systems, real-time computing, real-time networking, wireless sensor networks, security, and model-driven development. We outline the potential for CPSs in many societally important application domains.

http://cesg.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ps_files/12-02-10-CPS-Centennial.pdf

Cyber–Physical Systems: A Perspective at the Centennial

A survey of intrusion detection in Internet of Things

Wireless technology has been regarded as a paradigm shifter in the process industry. The first open wireless communication standard specifically designed for process measurement and control applications, WirelessHART was officially released in September 2007 (as a part of the HART 7 Specification). WirelessHART is a secure and TDMA- based wireless mesh networking technology operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM radio band. In this paper, we give an introduction to the architecture of WirelessHART and share our first-hand experience in building a prototype for this specification. We describe several challenges we had to tackle during the implementation, such as the design of the timer, network wide synchronization, communication security, reliable mesh networking, and the central network manager. For each challenge, we provide a detailed analysis and propose our solution. Based on the prototype implementation, a simple WirelessHART network has been built for the purpose of demonstration. The demonstration network in turn validates our design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported effort to build a WirelessHART protocol stack.

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WirelessHART: Applying Wireless Technology in Real-Time Industrial Process Control

Industrial wireless mesh networks are deployed in harsh and noisy environments for process measurement and control applications. Compared with wireless community networks, they have more stringent requirements on communication reliability and real-time performance. Missing or delaying of the process data by the network may severely degrade the overall control performance. In this paper, we abstract the primary reliability requirements in typical industrial wireless mesh networks and define three types of reliable routing graphs for different communication purposes. We present efficient algorithms to construct them and describe the recovery mechanisms in the event of component failures. Based on these graphs, data link layer communication schedules are generated to achieve end-to-end real-time performance. We demonstrate through extensive experimental results that our algorithms can achieve highly reliable routing, improved communication latency and stable real-time communication in large-scale networks at the cost of modest overhead in device configuration.

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Reliable and Real-Time Communication in Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger for recording transactions. It is maintained and shared among the participating nodes by utilizing cryptographic primitives. A consensus protocol ensures that all nodes agree on a unique order in which records are appended. However, current blockchain solutions are facing scalability issues. Many methods, such as Off-chain and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) solutions, have been proposed to address the issue. However, they have inherent drawbacks, e.g., forming parasite chains. Performance, such as throughput and latency, is also important to a blockchain system. Sharding has emerged as a good candidate that can overcome both the scalability and performance problems in blockchain. To date, there is no systematic work that analyzes the sharding protocols. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a systematic and comprehensive review on blockchain sharding techniques. We first present a general design flow of sharding protocols and then discuss key design challenges. For each challenge, we analyze and compare the techniques in state-of-the-art solutions. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions in blockchain sharding.

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SoK: Sharding on Blockchain

Applying wireless technologies in control systems can significantly enhance the system mobility and reduce the deployment and maintenance cost. Existing wireless technology standards, however either cannot provide real-time guarantee on packet delivery or are not fast enough to support high-speed control systems which typically require 1kHz or higher sampling rate. Nondeterministic packet transmission and insufficiently high sampling rate will severely hurt the control performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we present our design and implementation of a real-time high-speed wireless communication protocol called RT-WiFi. RT-WiFi is a TDMA data link layer protocol based on IEEE 802.11 physical layer to provide deterministic timing guarantee on packet delivery and high sampling rate up to 6kHz. It incorporates configurable components for adjusting design trade-offs including sampling rate, latency variance, reliability, and compatibility to existing Wi-Fi networks, thus can serve as an ideal communication platform for supporting a wide range of high-speed wireless control systems. We implemented RT-WiFi on commercial off-the-shelf hardware and integrated it into a mobile gait rehabilitation system. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RT-WiFi in providing deterministic packet delivery in both data link layer and application layer, which further eases the controller design and significantly improve the control performance.

Song Han

Papers

Industrial Internet of Things: Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions

WirelessHART: Applying Wireless Technology in Real-Time Industrial Process Control

Reliable and Real-Time Communication in Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks

SoK: Sharding on Blockchain

RT-WiFi: Real-Time High-Speed Communication Protocol for Wireless Cyber-Physical Control Applications