A Novel Oracle-Aided Industrial IoT Blockchain: Architecture, Challenges, and Potential Solutions

The manufacturing industry is benefiting a lot since the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deploys sensors and actuators to calibrate, audit, and analyze data to enhance efficiency and profitability, thereby automating systems in the industrial sector. The exponential growth of smart devices in the industrial sector requires real‐time connectivity, low latency, nearby storage, secure communication, and reliability. To meet this demand, fog computing is effectively used in IIoT applications. Fog computing solves most of the problems in the fourth industrial revolution, which is the interface between end‐user devices and cloud/web services. Fog also allows for local processing with minimal acceptable latency. This article focuses on how fog computing becomes part of IIoT and also explores the architecture of fog‐assisted IIoT applications. The taxonomy is built by classifying the existing literature to reveal the salient features of fog computing in IIoT. This article also discusses IIoT security solutions as well as research problems of fog‐assisted IIoT. This article also outlines the research challenges of fog‐assisted IIoT and also discusses the security solutions of IIoT.

Federated learning for green and sustainable 6G IIoT applications

The vision of Industry 4.0, otherwise known as the fourth industrial revolution, is the integration of massively deployed smart computing and network technologies in industrial production and manufacturing settings for the purposes of automation, reliability, and control, implicating the development of an Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT). Specifically, I-IoT is devoted to adopting the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable the interconnection of anything, anywhere, and at anytime in the manufacturing system context to improve the productivity, efficiency, safety and intelligence. As an emerging technology, I-IoT has distinct properties and requirements that distinguish it from consumer IoT, including the unique types of smart devices incorporated, network technologies and quality of service requirements, and strict needs of command and control. To more clearly understand the complexities of I-IoT and its distinct needs, and to present a unified assessment of the technology from a systems perspective, in this paper we comprehensively survey the body of existing research on I-IoT. Particularly, we first present the I-IoT architecture, I-IoT applications (i.e., factory automation (FA) and process automation (PA)) and their characteristics. We then consider existing research efforts from the three key systems aspects of control, networking and computing. Regarding control, we first categorize industrial control systems and then present recent and relevant research efforts. Next, considering networking, we propose a three-dimensional framework to explore the existing research space, and investigate the adoption of some representative networking technologies, including 5G, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, and software defined networking (SDN). Similarly, concerning computing, we again propose a second three-dimensional framework that explores the problem space of computing in I-IoT, and investigate the cloud, edge, and hybrid cloud and edge computing platforms. Finally, we outline particular challenges and future research needs in control, networking, and computing systems, as well as for the adoption of machine learning, in an I-IoT context.

Intelligent manufacturing is the future development direction of manufacturing industry. There are still some problems lurk in the traditional mode of production, such as “information island” and “network security”, which result in low productivity but high-cost production, and information leakage. With application of the new generation information technology in manufacturing field is expanded, the deep integration of information technology and manufacturing industry promotes the development of production towards intellectualization, networking, and service. Single mode of production is gradually replaced by the way of large-scale collaborative production, so the traditional industrial internet of things (IoT) and manufacturing architecture are not suitable for the needs of actual production any more. For instance, the great challenges of compatibility and coordination of interface protocols, huge data, cost, and safety. In order to solve these problems, a new model of industrial IoT with security mechanism used in intelligent workshop is proposed. Firstly, this article analyzes the current situation of manufacturing industry and information technology, a secure transmission model of industrial IoT was designed based on the new generation information technology. Secondly, combined with the structure of the IoT and the real production demands, a six-tier industrial IoT architecture based on the new generation information technology is proposed. Finally, the three dimensions of the intelligent manufacturing model are expanded according to the architecture of the IoT. Not only a six-tier intelligent manufacturing system framework based on the new generation of information technology is obtained, but also the network security mechanism is introduced. On one hand, it realizes the coordinated operation of industrial chain, supply chain, and value chain of production process, on the other hand, it also improves the networking, intellectualization, and service level of industrial production. What is more the system can also provide the reference model for the various application of IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is changing how people do business by interacting and connecting with things around them. IoT in industrial applications enables the connections between various architectures to provide better efficiency and flexibility. The Industrial Internet of Things brings potential innovation in multiple industries such as manufacturing, energy, transportation, agriculture, and healthcare. Industrial IoT is enabled by various technologies like sensors, big data, cloud, fog, machine learning, and deep learning. The emergence of all these technologies leads industries to enhance productivity, automate the manufacturing process, improve connectivity, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and decision-making tasks. Recently, privacy and security seem to be significant challenges in industrial IoT applications. Therefore, an in-depth review is needed to identify the various challenges in bringing IoT into industries. Hence, this book chapter gives an overview of various Industrial IoT applications in different sectors. It is also focused on significant technologies and architectural frameworks in Industrial IoT applications. Finally, this chapter presents the current technological challenges in developing Industrial IoT applications, which helps researchers pave the way and solve these challenges in the future.

Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation is essential in many industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications where IoT users may require a high-resolution estimation algorithm for features limited to positioning and device localization. The conventional DoA estimation is challenging as the number of antenna arrays increases leading to an increase in design complexity and cost in RF circuitry. As a result, the conventional DoA estimation algorithms may not be suited for IIoT applications. In this work, a joint DOA and carrier frequency offset (CFO) schemes is introduced for typical uplink IIoT systems by equipping the receiver with a leaky-wave antenna (LWA). By considering that the LWA can simultaneously steer its beam direction towards the active user. As a result, each user is estimated independently. The joint algorithm is developed based on the high-resolution MUSIC scheme, which utilizes the LWA properties to compute the DoA spectrum. Furthermore, we develop an iterative CFO estimation approach as the desired solution to a multi-dimensional search. Subsequently, we further formulate the Cramer–Rao lower bounds (CRLB) to serve as a performance benchmark for the accuracy of the proposed scheme. The SDR platform is provided to validate the proposed algorithm in real-time. Finally, the simulation results and the SDR experiments justify that the proposed scheme offers more robustness than conventional counterparts with linear array antenna, which achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) approach to the derived CLRB, especially at a medium signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range which suited for IIoT applications.

A growing number of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and services collect massive time series data related to production, monitoring and maintenance. To provide ubiquitous access, scalability and sharing possibilities, the IIoT applications utilize the cloud to store collected data streams. However, secure storing of the massive and continuously generated data poses significant privacy risks, including data breaches for IIoT applications. Alongside, we need to protect the utility of the data streams by allowing benign services to access and run analytics securely and selectively.This paper introduces SmartCrypt, a data storing and sharing system that supports analytics over the encrypted time series data. SmartCrypt enables users to secure and fine-grain sharing of their encrypted data. Additionally, SmartCrypt guarantees data confidentiality in the presence of unauthorized parties by allowing end-to-end encryption using a novel symmetric homomorphic encryption scheme. We perform exhaustive experiments on a real-world dataset primarily to assess the feasibility of SmartCrypt for secure storing and sharing of IIoT data streams. The results show that SmartCrypt reduces more than 17% query time, 32% range query time and improves 9% throughput over the best performed scheme in the state-of-the-art.

Internet of Things and cloud services are one of main enablers in fourth industrial revolution. Real-time industrial systems have high availability requirements of 99.9% to 99.999% whereas architectures built on regional cloud services and IoT do not provide similar guarantees or Service Level Agreement. These differences of QoS and SLA availability between Operational Technology and Information Technology has become a main challenge in adoption of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for real-time applications.This work presents an approach to find end-to-end QoS and availability for an IIoT architecture. Device-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and inside-cloud experiments have been performed over eight weeks where each experiment have more then four million QoS measurements. Our availability analysis shows that a remote IoT connected to a less busy cloud region gives higher availability as compared to an IoT device inside a busy cloud region. IIoT and regional cloud services provide good QoS with 99% to 99.9% availability for 1sec soft real-time requirements. In 100ms applications, more efforts are required to achieve higher then 95% availability and design industrial SLA. IIoT applications with 10sec latency like machine learning models can get 99.9% availability with cloud. Availability loss due to communication is almost 1% for 100ms applications. These results also provide requirements and future work of industrial edge computing for IIoT on real-time cloud.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is ushering in huge development opportunities in the era of Industry 4.0. However, there are significant data security and privacy challenges during automatic and real-time data collection, monitoring for industrial applications in IIoT. Data security and privacy in IIoT applications are closely related to the reliability of users, which is determined by user authentication that have been widely used as an effective approach. However, the existing user authentication mechanisms in IIoT suffer from single factor authentication and poor adaptability with the rapid growth of the number of users and the diversity of user categories. To solve the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a novel Authentication mechanism based on Transfer Learning empowered Blockchain, coined ATLB. In ATLB, blockchains are applied to achieve the privacy preservation for industrial applications. In addition, by introducing the transfer learning based authentication mechanism, trustworthy blockchains are built such that the privacy preservation for industrial applications is further enhanced. Specifically, ATLB first employs a guiding deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to train the user authentication model of a specific region, which is then transferred locally for foreign user authentication or cross-regionally for another region's user authentication such that the model training time is significantly reduced. Experimental results show that the proposed ATLB not only provides accurate authentications for IIoT applications but also achieves high throughput and low latency.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged as a new paradigm in the era of smart systems where interactions and transmission of messages among various entities in an industrial ecosystem are done autonomously. This includes manufacturing of products, shipment process, storage of records, and counting the data, to name a few. However, the involvement of multiple cyber threats that accompany the smart devices may lead the organizations on a heavy risk of profits. Even though the number of cybersecurity approaches have been proposed to ensure a secure and efficient communication mechanism in IIoT systems, the identification of cybersecurity issues in IIoT applications while exchanging the data is still at its early stage. The aim of this article is to propose an efficient cybersecurity communication mechanism using the trust evaluation system of each device to make a correct decision during communication. In addition, the evaluated trust of each device is further analyzed and monitored through a blockchain-based mechanism. The proposed approach is validated against an existing scheme in terms of various security metrics, such as sensitivity of devices while communicating, convergence time of transmitting information and percentage, and probability of malicious devices in terms of data delivery rate, false authentication, and trust value computation.

Industry 4.0 is a new concept representing the evolution of the current production systems through the convergence of new technologies of industrial automation and information systems. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) stands out for the communication among equipment and systems, offering to users a variety of useful information for the management of improvement of production systems. This paper presents the development of a wireless gateway for IIoT applications. This IIoT gateway is based on open source solutions and enables the programming, network communication and supervision of the industrial equipment. The communication protocols supported by the gateway are: Modbus TCP/IP, MQTT and CoAP for connection between the remote modules and the gateway and HTTP using the REST standard with JSON format for external communication with the gateway. An innovation and differential of the gateway was adding the OpenPLC project in order to enable the programming and automation of industrial processes according to the IEC 61131-3. In addition, the gateway stores process information and makes it available online and accessible in real-time to any point connected to the network and/or the Internet. Several operation tests performed validated the development and demonstrated the efficacy of the gateway.

The proliferation of the Internet of things (IoT) technologies has opened new avenues for technological advancements in various aspects of life. At the same time, the immense collection of competing IoT solutions has created new challenges in security and standards gaps that have attracted numerous research efforts. The majority of these research efforts are centered on the challenges of IoT in general. However, there is a growing separation between the two subcategories of IoT, the Consumer IoT (CIoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT), in terms of application, growth, scale, requirements, and challenges. The ability to distinguish between the two is critical for developing appropriate solutions, infrastructure, and standardization. This would pave the way to creating reliable, scalable, and secure CIoT and IIoT applications. This study highlights the differences between IoT types in terms of purpose, hardware needs, communication protocol requirements, and security concerns. We also investigate existing IIoT-related solutions to provide readers with clear and concise information to help them make more informed decisions about IoT solutions.

Recently, a new concept has emerged for the development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, the Industrializable Industrial Internet of Things (I3oT). As a criterion for the design of industrial applications, the I3oT imposes the exclusive use of pre-installed elements in the company such as PLCs, sensors, IT/OT networks, etc., trying to minimize the impact on the factories and guaranteeing a cheap and assumable scalability for companies, something that cannot be implemented with the vast majority of IIoT applications available in the market. In our previous work, we have used I3oT applications for predictive maintenance on different components: cylinders, presses, welding clamps and also energy-saving tools, detection of bottlenecks and sub-bottlenecks, etc., all of them generalized for the entire factory. However, the main drawback comes from the flow of data through the IT/OT network. This article presents the Cross-PLC, a tool to allow massive data extraction using the company's IT/OT network by communicating with any type of PLC or brand existing in the market. The Cross-PLC performs passive listening, and through different communication criteria, the Cross-PLC becomes a virtual PLC containing all the parameters necessary for the I3oT applications developed. This article presents the design of this tool, its implementation and use at Ford Factory in Almussafes (Valencia).

Internet of Things (IoT), together with fifth-generation (5G) mobile systems and related enabling communication technologies, constantly contributing for the enhancement in various industrial applications and driving towards the vision of complete industrial automation. In this context, both Blockchain and Edge computing are considered as promising technologies to fulfill the vision and requirements for the future Industry 4.0. The integration of these technologies together with massive scale Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications would be vital in addressing several key challenges related to e.g. latency, scalability and security of data processing and sharing, among others. However, such complex IIoT systems are constantly exposed to security threats from various sources. This paper focuses on identifying the major security challenges in the IIoT blockchain-edge related networks. In addition, some potential security solutions are presented in order to overcome these challenges.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems require robust mechanisms for secure firmware updates. Existing approaches are often inadequate due to vendor fragmentation, network limitations, and the safety-critical nature of many IIoT applications. In this paper, we address these challenges by extending the IETF SUIT (Software Updates for Internet of Things) framework to enhance the security and assurance of firmware updates. Our contributions include the integration of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) mechanisms and a Behavioral Certification Manifest into the SUIT architecture to increase transparency and provide formal guarantees about the content of the update. The approach is validated by a prototype implementation that demonstrates its feasibility and scalability using real-world benchmarks.