Deploying Fog Computing in Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0

Rapid technological advances have revolutionized the industrial sector. These advances range from automation of industrial processes to autonomous industrial processes, where a human input is not required. Internet of Things (IoT), which has emerged a few years ago, has been embraced by industry, resulting in what is known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IIoT refers to making industrial processes and entities part of the Internet. Restricting the definition of IIoT to manufacturing yields another subset of IoT, known as Industry 4.0. IIoT and Industry 4.0, will consist of sensor networks, actuators, robots, machines, appliances, business processes, and personnel. Hence, a lot of data of diverse nature would be generated. The industrial process requires most of the tasks to be performed locally because of delay and security requirements and structured data to be communicated over the Internet to web services and the cloud. To achieve this task, middleware support is required between the industrial environment and the cloud/web services. In this context, fog is a potential middleware that can be very useful for different industrial scenarios. Fog can provide local processing support with acceptable latency to actuators and robots in a manufacturing industry. Additionally, as industrial big data are often unstructured, it can be trimmed and refined by the fog locally, before sending it to the cloud. We present an architectural overview of IIoT and Industry 4.0. We discuss how fog can provide local computing support in the IIoT environment and the core elements and building blocks of IIoT. We also present a few interesting prospective use cases of IIoT. Finally, we discuss some emerging research challenges related to IIoT.

I. Introduction

Wireless sensor networking technologies have evolved significantly, and industrial sector is one of the beneficiaries. Communication technologies, such as Zigbee, Bluetooth low energy, and Internet Protocol version 6 over low-power wireless personal area network have also helped wireless sensor networking technologies to be adopted in the industrial environment [1]. The deployment and use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless sensor actuator/actor networks (WSANs) in industries make it possible to optimize the production line with better quality management, energy efficiency, fault prediction, product planning, and resource prediction. When data are collected from different sensors, actuators, and machines within an industrial environment and the access and control of the data and the devices generating it are enabled through the Internet, then such a scenario is called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While the Internet of Things (IoT) is providing Internet access to any “thing,” the IIoT restricts the “things” to the scenario of industry. Similar to the concept of IIoT, Industry 4.0 refers to the current fourth generation of industry focusing on the manufacturing industry scenario only that is a subset of IIoT. Fig. 1 shows the concept of IIoT and Industry 4.0 within IoT.