OPIIoT: Design and Implementation of an Open Communication Protocol Platform for Industrial Internet of Things

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) is an intelligent network of industrial components that can communicate with each other to enhance the performance of manufacturing and industrial processes. For the many advantages, such as less no contracts, free to develop and high inter-operability, in this work we propose using open-source technologies to develop IIoT platforms for information integration and data analysis. To realize the development and deployment of open source IIoTs, we present our framework OPIIoT (Open Communication Protocol Platform for Industrial Internet of Things) with the system construction cycle to solve various integration problems of operational technology and information technology. Moreover, we describe the underlying design principles and the implementation details of the proposed framework are given to make it more understandable and applicable to the IIoT platform developers. To verify the proposed framework, we have conducted both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We have compared the important features of our OPIIoT and several commercial platforms for industry, performed trials on data communication and analytics for information supports, and demonstrated the web interface for system implementation. The results prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework.