Improving devices communication in Industry 4.0 wireless networks

Internet of Things (IoT) and cyberphysical system (CPS) technologies play huge roles in the context of Industry 4.0. These technologies introduce cognitive automation to implement the concept of intelligent production, leading to smart products and services. One of the technological challenges related to Industry 4.0 is to provide support to big data cloud based applications which demand QoS-enabled Internet connectivity for information gathering, exchange, and processing. In order to deal with this challenge, in this article, a QoS-aware cloud based solution is proposed by adapting a recently proposed seamless resources sharing architecture to the IoT scenario. The resulting solution aims at improving device to cloud communications considering the coexistence of different wireless networks technologies, particularly in the domain of Industry 4.0. Results are obtained via simulations of three QoS demanding industrial applications. The outcomes of the simulations show that both delay and jitter QoS metrics are kept below their specific thresholds in the context of VoIP applications used for distributed manipulators fine tuning control. In the case of video-based production control, the jitter was controlled to meet the application demands, and even the throughput for best-effort supervisory systems HTTP access is guaranteed.