Industrial IoT in a 5G world - Architecture

An Industrial IoT system is a complex architecture encompassing sensors, communications, big-data storage, edge computing and advanced analytics among its disciplines. In the communications segment, the ‘last hop’ for Industrial IoT is now wireless wherever possible, driving cost saving,increased flexibility and greater mobility than wired connections. When considering the last hop, a key question, which we will investigate in this paper, is which wireless technology to select. For large-scale Industrial IoT networks,the viable technologies are variants of the Wi-Fi used in enterprise networking today, and 4G from public cellular networks.The paper examines the architectural strengths and weaknesses of each technology in the network models used today, comparing Wi-Fi 5 with public and private 4G architectures. It also covers the emerging Wi-Fi 6 and 5G technologies as they will become available to the Industrial IoT market in the near future.