More Like this

1. O-RAN Perspective on Industrial Internet of Things: A SWOT Analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIT58465.2023.10143032  

   Rahman, Talha Faizur; Zhang, Minglong; Marojevic, Vuk (June 2023, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT))

   Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to connect machines and enable an ecosystem for new applications and use cases. One such use case is industrial loT (1IoT) that refers to the application of loT in industrial settings especially engaging instrumentation and control of sensors and machines with Cloud technologies. Industries are counting on the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications to provide seamless, ubiquitous and flexible connectivity among machines, people and sensors. The open radio access network (O-RAN) architecture adds additional interfaces and RAN intelligent controllers that can be leveraged to meet the IIoT service requirements. In this paper, we examine the connectivity requirements for IIoT that are dominated by two industrial applications: control and monitoring. We present the strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis of O-RAN for IIoT and provide a use case example which illustrates how O-RAN can support diverse and changing IIoT network services. We conclude that the flexibility of the O-RAN architecture, which supports the latest cellular network standards and services, provides a path forward for next generation IIoT network design, deployment, customization, and maintenance. It offers more control but still lacks products-hardware and software-that are exhaustively tested in production like environments. 

   more » « less
2. APaS: An Adaptive Partition-Based Scheduling Framework for 6TiSCH Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS52030.2021.00033  

   Wang, Jiachen; Zhang, Tianyu; Shen, Dawei; Hu, Xiaobo Sharon; Han, Song (May 2021, the 27th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS))

   null (Ed.)

   The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of real-time wireless technologies and their wide adoption in various industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) applications. Among those wireless technologies, 6TiSCH is a promising candidate as the de facto standard due to its nice feature of gluing a real-time link-layer standard (802.15.4e, for offering deterministic communication performance) together with an IP-enabled upper-layer stack (for seamlessly supporting Internet services). 6TiSCH's built-in random slot selection scheduling algorithm, however, often leads to large and unbounded transmission latency, thus can hardly meet the real-time requirements of IIoT applications. This paper proposes an adaptive partition based scheduling framework, APaS, for 6TiSCH networks. APaS introduces the concept of resource partitioning into 6TiSCH network management. Instead of allocating network resources to individual devices, APaS partitions and assigns network resources to different groups of devices based on their layers in the network so as to guarantee that the transmission latency of any end-toend flow is within one slotframe length. APaS also employs a novel online partition adjustment method to further improve its adaptability to dynamic network topology changes. The effectiveness of APaS is validated through both simulation and testbed experiments on a 122-node multi-hop 6TiSCH network. 

   more » « less
3. Design patterns for the industrial Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1109/WFCS.2018.8402353  

   Bloom, Gedare; Alsulami, Bassma; Nwafor, Ebelechukwu; Bertolotti, Ivan Cibrario (June 2018, 2018 14th IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS))

   The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast collection of interconnected sensors, devices, and services that share data and information over the Internet with the objective of leveraging multiple information sources to optimize related systems. The technologies associated with the IoT have significantly improved the quality of many existing applications by reducing costs, improving functionality, increasing access to resources, and enhancing automation. The adoption of IoT by industries has led to the next industrial revolution: Industry 4.0. The rise of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) promises to enhance factory management, process optimization, worker safety, and more. However, the rollout of the IIoT is not without significant issues, and many of these act as major barriers that prevent fully achieving the vision of Industry 4.0. One major area of concern is the security and privacy of the massive datasets that are captured and stored, which may leak information about intellectual property, trade secrets, and other competitive knowledge. As a way forward toward solving security and privacy concerns, we aim in this paper to identify common input-output (I/O) design patterns that exist in applications of the IIoT. These design patterns enable constructing an abstract model representation of data flow semantics used by such applications, and therefore better understand how to secure the information related to IIoT operations. In this paper, we describe communication protocols and identify common I/O design patterns for IIoT applications with an emphasis on data flow in edge devices, which, in the industrial control system (ICS) setting, are most often involved in process control or monitoring. 

   more » « less
4. Moisture Estimation in Woodchips Using IIoT Wi-Fi and Machine Learning Techniques

   https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-85159-6.50276-1  

   Suthar, K.; He, Q.P. (January 2022, Computer aided chemical engineering)

   For the pulping process in a pulp & paper plant that uses woodchips as raw material, the moisture content (MC) of the woodchips is a major process disturbance that affects product quality and consumption of energy, water, and chemicals. Existing woodchip MC sensing technologies have not been widely adopted by the industry due to unreliable performance and/or high maintenance requirements that can hardly be met in a manufacturing environment. To address these limitations, we propose a non-destructive, economic, and robust woodchip MC sensing approach utilizing channel state information (CSI) from industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) based Wi-Fi. While these IIoT devices are small, low-cost, and rugged to stand for harsh environment, they do have their limitations such as the raw CSI data are often very noisy and sensitive to woodchip packing. Thus, direct application of machine learning (ML) algorithms leads to poor performance. To address this, statistics pattern analysis (SPA) is utilized to extract physically and statistically meaningful features from the raw CSI data, which are sensitive to woodchip MC but not to packing. The SPA features are then used for developing multiclass classification models as well as regression models using various linear and nonlinear ML techniques to provide potential solutions to woodchip MC estimation for the pulp and paper industry. 

   more » « less
5. Recorp: Receiver-oriented Policies for Industrial Wireless Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3460618  

   Brummet, Ryan; Hossain, Md Kowsar; Chipara, Octav; Herman, Ted; Stewart, David E. (July 2021, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks)

   Future Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems will require wireless solutions to connect sensors, actuators, and controllers as part of high data rate feedback-control loops over real-time flows. A key challenge in such networks is to provide predictable performance and adaptability in response to link quality variations. We address this challenge by developing RECeiver ORiented Policies (Recorp), which leverages the stability of IIoT workloads by combining offline policy synthesis and run-time adaptation. Compared to schedules that service a single flow in a slot, Recorp policies share slots among multiple flows by assigning a coordinator and a list of flows that may be serviced in the same slot. At run-time, the coordinator will execute one of the flows depending on which flows the coordinator has already received. A salient feature of Recorp is that it provides predictable performance: a policy meets the end-to-end reliability and deadline of flows when the link quality exceeds a user-specified threshold. Experiments show that across IIoT workloads, policies provided a median increase of 50% to 142% in real-time capacity and a median decrease of 27% to 70% in worst-case latency when schedules and policies are configured to meet an end-to-end reliability of 99%. 

   more » « less